High-Level Modeling of Software-Management Interactions and Tasks for Autonomic Computing

For making software systems autonomic, it is important to understand and model software-management tasks. Each such task contains typically many interactions between the administrator and the software system. We propose to model software-management interactions and tasks in the form of a discourse between the administrator and the software system. Such discourse models are based on insights from theories of human communication. This should make them "natural" for humans to define and understand. While it may be obvious that such discourse models cover software-management interactions, we found that they may also represent major parts of the related tasks. Our well-defined models of interactions and tasks as well as their operationalization should facilitate their execution and automation.