Towards Antifragile Software Architectures

Abstract: Antifragility is a rising issue in Software Engineering. Due to pervasiveness of software in a growing number of mission critical applications, traditional resilience and recovery systems may not be sufficient. Software has taken over many functionalities which are of vital interest in today and future world. We relay a lot on software applications which may be faulty and cause immense damages. To cope with this scenario, claiming to develop better software is not enough, since unexpected events a.k.a. Black Swans, may disrupt and overcome our system. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new architectural design that responds to the need to build antifragile systems for contemporary complex scenarios. We suggest a system which enhances its strength through experience and errors. It is a self adaptive system architecture improving when facing errors. The most relevant aspect of this approach is that architectures are not only resilient, they extract the intrinsic value of faults. This paper suggests that a fine grained architecture is the key issue to build antifragile systems.