Requirements monitoring in distributed environments

Abstract

We propose requirements monitoring to aid in the maintenance of systems that reside in dynamic, distributed environments. By requirements monitoring we mean the insertion of code into a running system to gather information from which it can be determined whether, and to what degree, that running system is meeting its requirements. Monitoring is a commonly applied technique in support of performance tuning, but the focus therein is primarily on computational performance requirements in short runs of systems. We wish to address systems that operate in a long-lived, ongoing fashion in non-scientific, enterprise applications. We argue that the results of requirements monitoring can be of benefit to the designers, maintainers and users of a system-alerting them when the system is being used in an environment for which it was not designed, and giving them the information they need to direct their redesign of the system. Studies of two commercial systems are used to illustrate and justify our claims.<>