Closing the Dependability Gap: Converging Software Engineering with Middleware

The inertness of today’s software systems turns innova-tive applications into an obstacle rather than an enabler and results in dependability degradation during the sys-tems ’ lifetime. Even more so, heterogeneity, scale, and dy-namics open up what Laprie called the dependability gap. In this position paper, we identify the need to converge methods from software engineering with traditional mid-dleware and dependable systems research to close the de-pendability gap. In particular, we suggest a nested control loop approach, where the inner loop addresses short-term changes autonomously, while the outer loop addresses long-term evolution by run-time software engineering. 1. Dependability Gap While computing is becoming a utility and software ser