1 Requirements-Driven Design of Autonomic Application Software

Autonomic computing systems reduce software maintenance costs and management complexity by taking on the responsibility for their configura-tion, optimization, healing, and protection. These tasks are accomplished by switching at runtime to a different system behaviour – the one that is more efficient, more secure, more stable, etc. – while still fulfilling the main purpose of the sys-tem. Thus, identifying the objectives of the sys-tem, analyzing alternative ways of how these objectives can be met, and designing a system that supports all or some of these alternative behav-iours is a promising way to develop autonomic systems. This paper proposes the use of require-ments goal models as a foundation for such soft-ware development process and demonstrates this on an example.