Requirements model driven adaption and evolution of Internetware

Today’s software systems need to support complex business operations and processes. The development of the web-based software systems has been pushing up the limits of traditional software engineering methodologies and technologies as they are required to be used and updated almost real-time, so that users can interact and share the same applications over the internet as needed. These applications have to adapt quickly to the diversified and dynamic changing requirements in the physical, technological, economical and social environments. As a consequence, we are expecting a major paradigm shift in software engineering to reflect such changes in computing environment in order to better address the fundamental needs of organisations in this new era. Existing software technologies, such as model driven development, business process engineering, online (re-)configuration, composition and adaptation of managerial functionalities are being repurposed to reduce the time taken for software development by reusing software codes. The ability to dynamically combine contents from numerous web sites and local resources, and the ability to instantly publish services worldwide have opened up entirely new possibilities for software development. In retrospect to the ten years applied research on Internetware, we have witnessed such a paradigm shift, which brings about many changes to the developmental experience of conventional web applications. Several related technologies, such as cloud computing, service computing, cyber-physical systems and social computing, have converged to address this emerging issue with emphasis on different aspects. In this paper, we first outline the requirements that the Internetware software paradigm should meet to excel at web application adaptation; we then propose a requirement model driven method for adaptive and evolutionary applications; and we report our experiences and case studies of applying it to an enterprise information system. Our goal is to provide high-level guidelines to researchers and practitioners to meet the challenges of building adaptive industrial-strength applications with the spectrum of processes, techniques and facilities provided within the Internetware paradigm.