Computing systems form the backbone of many areas in our society, from manufacturing to traffic control, healthcare, and financial systems. When software plays a vital role in the design, construction, and operation, these systems are referred to as software-intensive systems. Self-adaptation equips a software-intensive system with a feedback loop that either automates tasks that otherwise need to be performed by human operators or deals with uncertain conditions. Such feedback loops have found their way to a variety of practical applications; typical examples are an elastic cloud to adapt computing resources and automated server management to respond quickly to business needs. To gain insight into the motivations for applying self-adaptation in practice, the problems solved using self-adaptation and how these problems are solved, and the difficulties and risks that industry faces in adopting self-adaptation, we performed a large-scale survey. We received 184 valid responses from practitioners spread over 21 countries. Based on the analysis of the survey data, we provide an empirically grounded overview the of state of the practice in the application of self-adaptation. From that, we derive insights for researchers to check their current research with industrial needs, and for practitioners to compare their current practice in applying self-adaptation. These insights also provide opportunities for applying self-adaptation in practice and pave the way for future industry-research collaborations.

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.

The timely discovery, sharing and integration of architectural knowledge (AK) have become critical aspects in enabling the software architects to make meaningful conceptual and technical design decisions and trade-offs. In large-scale organizations particular obstacles in making AK available to architects are a heterogeneous pool of internal and external knowledge sources, poor interoperability between AK management tools and limited support of computational AK reasoning. Therefore we introduce the Continuous Architectural Knowledge Integration (CAKI) approach that combines the continuous integration of internal and external AK sources together with enhanced semantic reasoning and personalization capabilities dedicated to large organizations. Preliminary evaluation results show that CAKI potentially reduces AK search effort by concurrently yielding more diverse and relevant results.

Collective intelligence systems (CIS), such as wikis, social networks and content sharing platforms, have dramatically improved knowledge creation and sharing at society level. There is a trend to exploit the stigmergic mechanisms of CIS also at organization/corporate level. However, despite the wide adoption of CIS, there is a lack of consolidated systematic knowledge of the architectural principles and practices that underlie CIS. Software architects lack guidance to design CIS for the application context of individual organizations. To address these challenges, we contribute with an architecture framework for CIS, aligned with ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010. The CIS-AF framework provides guidance for architects to describe key CIS elements and systematically model a CIS that is well-suited for an organization's context and goals. The framework is grounded in an in-depth analysis of existing CIS, workshops and interviews with key stakeholders, and experiences from developing a prototypical CIS. We evaluated the architecture framework in two cases in industry setting where CIS have been designed and implemented using the framework. Results show that the framework effectively supports stakeholders with providing a shared vocabulary of CIS concepts, guiding them to systematically apply the stigmergic principles of CIS, and supporting them with kick starting CIS in their organizations.

The development of video games comprises engineering teams within various disciplines, e.g., software engineering, game production, and creative arts. Game jams are a promising approach for (software+) development projects to foster on new product development. This paper evaluates the concept of game jam, a community design/development activity, and its positive effects on new software product development with tight schedules in time-oriented, competitive environments. Game jams have received more public attention in recent times, but the concept itself has not been formally discussed so far. A game jam is a composition of design and development strategies: new product development, participatory design, lightweight construction, rapid experience prototyping, product-value focusing, aesthetics and technology, concurrent development and multidisciplinarity. Although game jams are normally used for rapid prototyping of small computer games, the constellation of the mentioned elements provides a powerful technique for rapidly prototyping new product ideas and disruptive innovations.