Requirements Engineering for Adaptive Service Based Applications

Service-Based Applications (SBA) are inherently open and distributed, as they rely on third-party services that are available over the Internet, and have to cope with the dynamism of such operating environment. This motivates the need for SBA to be self-adaptive to accommodate changes in service availability and performance, in consumers´ needs and preferences, and more generally in the operational environment, which may occur at run-time. Engineering such applications significantly challenges the role of requirements engineering (RE). Usually, RE is carried out at the outset of the whole development process, but in the context of SBA, RE activities are also needed at run-time thus enabling a seamless SBA evolution. In this paper, we investigate RE for SBA at run-time proposing a method that supports the continuous refinement of requirements artifacts at run-time, which involves consumers and the SBA itself as primary stakeholders.