1. Software Engineering to Autonomic Computing

Software, as an artefact, has been tremendously successful. It has pervaded every aspect of our professional and social life, due mainly to the outstanding advances in hardware, but also to undeniable progress in software engineering practices that allow the timely production of high-quality computing products. Software is however a victim of its own success. The software systems of today have to constantly face new and demanding requirements in terms of their availability, robustness, dynamism and pervasiveness. This is challenging, the way software systems are produced and managed. In particular, great pressure is put on the maintenance of software and systems; maintenance tasks are becoming increasingly difficult and correspondingly more time-consuming to carry out. Today, many believe that we have reached a barrier in terms of complexity and that innovative practices are needed to ensure the continuous delivery of software-based services. In this introductory chapter, we present how software systems are currently being developed and managed. We show how the use of software has evolved and how this has impacted on the software development and maintenance processes. In particular, we show that much of the complexity involved with the software life cycle has moved from the development stage to the maintenance stage, which raises formidable challenges for practitioners. Finally, we briefly introduce the field of autonomic computing, a relatively new spin on the ways we build and maintain software systems and whose purpose is to overcome some of these aforementioned problems we highlight. This chapter motivates the need for autonomic computing systems.