Guidelines for Artifacts to Support Industry-Relevant Research on Self-Adaptation

TL;DR

This paper presents guidelines and a template for artifacts in self-adaptive systems research, ensuring they support industry-relevant problems and align with practitioner needs.

Contribution

It introduces empirically grounded guidelines and a template to enhance the industrial relevance of artifacts in self-adaptation research.

Findings

Guidelines derived from practitioner survey data.

Artifact template proposed for industry relevance.

Evaluation criteria for existing artifacts.

Abstract

Artifacts support evaluating new research results and help comparing them with the state of the art in a field of interest. Over the past years, several artifacts have been introduced to support research in the field of self-adaptive systems. While these artifacts have shown their value, it is not clear to what extent these artifacts support research on problems in self-adaptation that are relevant to industry. This paper provides a set of guidelines for artifacts that aim at supporting industry-relevant research on self-adaptation. The guidelines that are grounded on data obtained from a survey with practitioners were derived during working sessions at the 17th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems. Artifact providers can use the guidelines for aligning future artifacts with industry needs; they can also be used to evaluate the industrial relevance of existing artifacts. We also propose an artifact template.