Self-adaptive quality requirement elicitation process for legacy systems: a case study in healthcare

Abstract

Legacy systems need to be continuously maintained and reengineered to improve their provision of services and improve quality attributes. An approach that promises to improve quality attributes and reduce human maintenance tasks is the self-adaptive approach, where software systems modify their own behaviour. However, there is little guidance in the literature on how to migrate to a self-adaptive system and evaluate which features should be designed/implemented with self-adaptive behaviour. In this paper, we describe a process called Self-Adaptive Quality Requirement Elicitation Process (SAQEP), a process that allows eliciting quality attribute requirements from legacy system stakeholders and specify which of these requirements can be taken account to be implemented in a self-adaptation system. The SAQEP has been applied to elicit the self-adaptive quality requirements of a legacy system in a Mexican hospital. We also discuss our experience applying this approach.