A documentation approach for the self-adaptive system design

During the self-adaptive software system design, one of the deficiencies of past research is that past behaviors are always applied to predict future behaviors. As the past is not always a good predictor of the future, such strategies may cause poor performance while the behavior changes. In this paper, we introduce a document-driven approach for developing a self-adaptive software system to enhance its qualities such as performance. In our approach, how to use precise mathematical documentation to build adaptive systems is shown, and we also offer the documents that are used to bind on developers. As a result, this approach ensures that the adaptive behavior is based on reliable information rather than heuristics. Especially, we apply the "plug-and-play" idea; therefore our approach is a good solution for situations where new versions of components may be "plugged into" an existing system and that system must adapt itself to the new component. To demonstrate two different possibilities, we illustrate our approach by using two case studies.