From off-Line to continuous on-line maintenance

Software is the cornerstone of the modern society, which can hardly tolerate failures and service discontinuity. At the same time, software systems are rapidly changing, and often rely on dynamically linked modules and services that may not be even available at design time. Classic off-line verification that require access to the whole software system, and stop-and-go maintenance that works off line badly adapt to these new needs of modern software systems. Self-healing technology addresses the new demands of software systems by moving some V&V activities from design to runtime. Self-healing systems can detect failures, diagnose, locate and correct faults fully automatically and at runtime, thus guaranteeing rapid recovery and resilience to software failures. In this talk, I discusses how systems can detect and heal failures and faults that are unknown at runtime without additional human intervention, identify intrinsic software redundancy as a great opportunity that can be exploited to automatically deal with emerging problems at runtime, and indicate how self-healing technology can impact on classic maintenance approaches