Self Management and the Future of Software Design

Most software is fragile: even the slightest error, such as changing a single bit, can make it crash. As software complexity has increased, development techniques have kept pace to manage this fragility. But today there is a new challenge. Complexity is increasing rapidly as a result of two factors: the increasing use of distributed systems as a result of the sufficient reliability and bandwidth of the Internet, and the increasing scale of these systems as a result of the addition of many new computers to the Internet (e.g., mobile phones and other devices). To manage this new complexity, we propose an approach based on selfmanaging systems: systems that can maintain useful functionality despite changes in their environment. The paper motivates this approach and gives some ideas on how to build general self-managing software systems. An important part of the approach is to build systems as hierarchies of interacting feedback loops. We give examples of these systems and we deduce some ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: ENTCS
• Authors: Peter Van Roy
• Keywords: ENTCS 2007, Most Software, Slightest Error, Systems