In the context of high performance systems and critical applications, the general objective of the SACSO project is to design Self-Adaptive Systems, which are able of monitoring the surrounding environment and adapt themselves to different scenarios and requirements. In other words, a Self-Adaptive System must be able to provide the required high performances regardless the application mode and despite the changing environmental conditions. The fundamental concept of self-adaptation by itself is not completely new: self-calibration techniques applied after manufacturing have been developed to deal with the many sources of technological variations and self-compensation techniques applied during the lifetime of the system have been developed to deal with the ageing effects. In this project, we address two non-classical cases of self-adaptability: self-adaptation to the application and self-adaptation to the environment.In order to develop a generic methodology, the project is based on three demonstrators covering wide part of possible contexts. One the demonstrators, a sensor for Intra-Ocular Pressure measurement, illustrates both active front-end and medical contexts. For all these case studies, we highlight the different bottlenecks to achieve self-adaptation system and we define generic strategy suitable in all context.