Self-adaptive quality requirement elicitation process for legacy systems

Legacy systems need to be continuously maintained and re-engineered to improve their provision of services and improve quality attributes. An approach that promises to improve quality attributes and reduce human maintenance tasks is the self-adaptive approach, where software systems modify their own behaviour. However, there is little guidance in the literature on how to migrate to a self-adaptive system and evaluate which features should be designed/implemented with self-adaptive behaviour. In this paper, we describe a process called Self-Adaptive Quality Requirement Elicitation Process (SAQEP), a process that allows eliciting quality attribute requirements from legacy system stakeholders and specify which of these requirements can be taken account to be implemented in a self-adaptation system. The SAQEP has been applied to elicit the self-adaptive quality requirements of a legacy system in a Mexican hospital. We also discuss our experience applying this approach.