With the advent of programmable hardware, seen since the early 1980s, we have what we can identify as the configware-based computing. For a computing system, being able to adapt at runtime is definitely a huge leap, but pay attention, as most of the IT technologies, the idea, the rationale behind it, has been taken from our every day life. As humans, we are living in an adaptable, reconfigurable world! Reconfiguration is everywhere. Let’s just consider an analogy with sports: in football we are observing different kind of reconfigurations. According to the phase of the game, we may have on the field a defensive line, or an offensive line, but the important thing is that, whenever we are changing our line, the other team is not playing. Within this context we can consider this situation as a complete static reconfiguration. It is complete, because we are allowed to change the entire line, and it is static, because the other team cannot continue to play, while the reconfiguration is taking place. Within the soccer scenario, on the other hand, we can have a different kind of reconfiguration. In soccer we are not allowed to change the entire team, but still we can partially reconfigure our team by swapping some of the players. This is a different kind of adaptation, but still the opponent team is not allowed to play the ball while we are doing an “update” in the configuration of our team. Therefore, in such a scenario, we are observing a partial static reconfiguration. Finally, we can get things even more interesting, and this is hockey case! In hockey we can do “whatever we want”. We can swap player in and out, and we can do it dynamically, while the game is on! This means that we can take advantages of doing all the “updates” that we want, but we have to be careful while doing it. First of all, we have to guarantee that the overall number of players is not going to exceed the maximum allowed. Second, we do have to be a terrific coach in knowing when to change a player with another one. Runtime management is going to be crucial. That’s where strategies are coming to play, bad strategies can lead us to a corner, but if are going to play properly with our players, being able to read the match, we are going to take a huge advantage by the possibility of adapting at runtime. Moreover, which is a thing that has to be kept always in mind, it may happen that reconfiguration is going to be required… maybe to recover from a fault, or, if you’d prefer, considering the picture, from an injury.
