Title: Tolerating uncertainty via evolvable-by-design software
Abstract
Uncertainty is ubiquitous when software is designed. Requirements are often uncertain, and volatile. Assumptions about the behavior of the environment in which the software will be embedded are also often uncertain. The virtual platform on which the software will be operated may likewise be subject to uncertain operating conditions. Design-time uncertainty is resolved during operation, and often the way it is resolved changes over time. This leads to the need for software to evolve continuously, to keep guaranteeing satisfaction of its quality goals.
Evolution can partly be self-managed, by adding self-adaptive capabilities to the software. This requires an upfront careful analysis to understand where the sources of uncertainty, how they can be resolved during operation, and how they can be managed through dynamic reconfigurations. Whenever self-adaptation cannot solve the problems, designers must be in the loop to provide new solutions that can be dynamically incorporated in the running system.
The talk provides a holistic view of how to handle uncertainty, which is based on the notion of perpetual development and adaptation. It shows that existing approaches to software development need to be rethought to respond to these challenges. The traditional separation between development and operation (design time and run time) blurs and even fades. The talk especially focuses on modeling and verification, which need to be rethought in the light of perpetual development and evolution. It also focuses on achieving self-adaptation to support continuous satisfaction of non-functional requirements --- such as reliability, performance, energy consumption --- in the context of virtualized environments (cloud computing, service-oriented computing).
Bio
Carlo Ghezzi is an ACM Fellow (1999), an IEEE Fellow (2005), a member of the European Academy of Sciences and of the Italian Academy of Sciences. He received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2015) and the Distinguished Service Award (2006). He is the current President of Informatics Europe.
He is a regular member of the program committee of flagship conferences in the software engineering field, such as the ICSE and ESEC/FSE, for which he also served as Program and General Chair.
He has been the Editor in Chief of the ACM Trans. on Software Engineering and Methodology and an associate editor of and IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering. Currently he is an Associate Editor of the Communications of the ACM and Science of Computer Programming.
Ghezzi’s research has been mostly focusing on different aspects of software engineering. He co-authored over 200 papers and 8 books. He coordinated several national and international research projects. He has been the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant.
