This position paper advocates the use of the well defined and provable self-stabilization property of a system, to achieve the goals of the self-* paradigms and autonomic computing. Several recent results starting from hardware concerns, continuing with the operating system, and ending in the applications, are integrated: the self-stabilizing microprocessor, with the self-stabilizing operating system, the self-stabilization preserving compiler, and the self-stabilizing autonomic recoverer for applications

Computerized management of critical systems makes the issues of correctness and faultless flow of long-lived and continuously-running programs extremely important e.g., [6, 7]. Complex systems cannot be fully verified because their verification may require an unreasonable amount of time and space. The software industry tests software products extensively in order to eliminate bugs as much as possible. Normally, software is tested by executing a set of large, but length-bounded and non-exhaustive scenarios starting from a predefined initial state while each scenario is defined by a set of input/output sequences. Undesired and unplanned behavior (bug) may occur due to scenarios that were not tested prior to the software release. Software malfunctions may cause damage that can outweigh the software cost. Keeping all this in mind, a consumer of a critical system would like to have a warranty that such a system will operate properly.