Quality of Adaptation

In order to support reusable and extendable solutions to self-adaptation, state of the art within adaptive systems include a diversity of architectures and mechanisms targeting different application types, technologies, context and concerns. Current approaches do not allow reasoning about the mechanisms and strategies themselves during startup-time or run-time. Consequently, the configuration or tuning of the adaptation system itself, must be done manually by a user or an administrator, or hard coded at design-time, making it harder to reuse. In this position paper, we propose considering adaptation as a service. In order to allow reasoning about and comparing such services, we define quality of adaptation (QoA) to be the qualitative properties of an adaptation service. We argue that this approach facilitates the development of adaptation mechanisms and control that are, like the system they adapt, reusable and adaptable, and open to evolution