Preliminary Results of a Survey on the Use of Self-Adaptation in Industry

TL;DR

This paper presents preliminary survey results from 113 industry practitioners on the motivations, use cases, and challenges of implementing self-adaptation in software systems, especially in cloud environments.

Contribution

It provides initial insights into real-world application and difficulties of self-adaptation, filling a gap in understanding current industry practices.

Findings

Motivations for self-adaptation include automation and efficiency.

Common use cases involve elastic cloud management.

Main difficulties are related to implementation and integration challenges.

Abstract

Self-adaptation equips a software system with a feedback loop that automates tasks that otherwise need to be performed by operators. Such feedback loops have found their way to a variety of practical applications, one typical example is an elastic cloud. Yet, the state of the practice in self-adaptation is currently not clear. To get insights into the use of self-adaptation in practice, we are running a large-scale survey with industry. This paper reports preliminary results based on survey data that we obtained from 113 practitioners spread over 16 countries, 62 of them work with concrete self-adaptive systems. We highlight the main insights obtained so far: motivations for self-adaptation, concrete use cases, and difficulties encountered when applying self-adaptation in practice. We conclude the paper with outlining our plans for the remainder of the study.