On the Definition of Self-service Systems

Changing requirements are common in today’s organizations, and have been a central concern in Requirements Engineering (RE). Over time, methods have been developed to deal with such variability. Yet, the latter often require considerable amount of time to be applied. As timeto-value is becoming a critical requirement of users, new types of systems have been developed to deal more efficiently with changing requirements: the Self-Service Systems. In this paper, we provide an overall discussion about what self systems are, what they imply in terms of engineering, how they can be designed, and what type of questions they raise to RE.