Towards Specification Completion for Systems with Emergent Behavior based on DevOps

Software systems may experience multiple emergent behaviors during their operation time. These emergent system behaviors occur when system engineers develop their system under the closed-world assumption, but this assumption is not met during its operation. This means that system engineers work on the basis that they have complete knowledge of the system and its environment during its design, when the system specification that has been created is actually incomplete. In this paper, an observation of an emergent behavior is considered to be a solid proof that the system model specification is still incomplete. A conceptual framework is proposed to harness the emergent behavior and complete the system specification that is provided during the its design. The framework consists of two parts, system development and system operations. It is built on a model-driven approach in order to provide a clear definition of the emergent behavior and a concrete development scheme. The framework exploits the DevOps paradigm as a successful paradigm to achieve the ultimate goal of developing complete system models through the continuous specification completion based on the observed emergent behavior. The goal of this framework is to help develop high-quality and reliable emergent systems based on the specification derived from the emergent behavior that occurred at run time.