Towards an integrated approach for validating qualities of self-adaptive systems

Self-adaptation has been widely recognized as an effective ap-proach to deal with the increasing complexity and dynamicity of modern software systems. One major challenge in self-adaptive systems is to provide guarantees about the required runtime quali-ties, such as performance and reliability. Existing research employs formal methods either to provide guarantees about the design of a self-adaptive systems, or to perform runtime analysis supporting adaptations for particular quality goals. Yet, work products of for-malization are not exploited over different phases of the software life cycle. In this position paper, we argue for an integrated for-mally founded approach to validate the required software qualities of self-adaptive systems. This approach integrates three activities: (1) model checking of the behavior of a self-adaptive system dur-ing design, (2) model-based testing of the concrete implementation during development, and (3) runtime diagnosis after system deploy-ment. We illustrate the approach with excerpts of an initial study and discuss for each activity research challenges ahead.