This talk shortly reports on the results of the SALTY R&D project (https://salty.unice.fr) funded by the French funding agency (ANR). The key outcome of this project is a software framework that covers both design-time and runtime support for integrating self-adaptive behaviours into potentially complex legacy systems. SALTY therefore provides a reflective domain-specific model to externalise and make explicit the control layer of legacy systems. While the adoption of a domain-specific model leverages the mapping on different middleware stacks (FraSCAti or Akka in our case studies), it also acts as a pivot, within a modular toolchain, to implement design-time verifications and to inject runtime guards. Future case studies of this approach will cover green computing, crowd- sensing, and big data systems.