The pervasiveness and growing complexity of software systems is challenging software engineering to de- sign systems that can adapt their behavior to withstand unpredictable, uncertain, and continuously chang- ing execution environments. Control theoretical adaptation mechanisms received a growing interest from the software engineering community in the last years for their mathematical grounding allowing formal guarantees on the behavior of the controlled systems. However, most of these mechanisms are tailored to specific applications and can hardly be generalized into broadly applicable software design and development processes. This paper discusses a reference control design process, from goal identification to the verification and validation of the controlled system. A taxonomy of the main control strategies is introduced, analyzing their applicability to software adaptation for both functional and non-functional goals. A brief extract on how to deal with uncertainty complements the discussion. Finally, the paper highlights a set of open challenges, both for the software engineering and the control theory research communities.