A theory and model for the evolution of software services

Software services are subject to constant change and variation. To control service development, a service developer needs to know why a change was made, what are its implications and whether the change is complete. Typically, service clients do not perceive the upgraded service immediately. As a consequence, service-based applications may fail on the service client side due to changes carried out during a provider service upgrade. In order to manage changes in a meaningful and effective manner service clients must therefore be considered when service changes are introduced at the service provider's side. Otherwise such changes will most certainly result in severe application disruption. Eliminating spurious results and inconsistencies that may occur due to uncontrolled changes is therefore a necessary condition for the ability of services to evolve gracefully, ensure service stability, and handle variability in their behavior. Towards this goal, this work presents a model and a theoretical framework for the compatible evolution of services based on well-founded theories and techniques from a number of disparate fields.

An Evolution Process For Service-Oriented Systems

Evolution of service-oriented systems is quite a new research area, which becomesmore and more important as engineering challenges move from enablingservice-orientation onto the maintenance and evolution of already developedservice-oriented systems. However, the development of suitable evolution processesand methodologies is still an open research problem. The evolution processpresented in this paper has been designed to address the evolution of serviceorientedsystems, which are technically built out of a set of service compositions.The presented process comprises phases and tasks compliant with ISO 20000.The underlying model of service-oriented system consisting of business processesand corresponding service composition models has also been presented. A traceabilitymodel and tools supporting change impact analysis have also beenprovisioned for. Preliminary industrial validation indicates that the evolutionprocess should be easy to adapt by the industry

BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

Towards a More Mobile KMS

Present knowledge management systems (KMS) hardly leverage the advances in technology in their designs. The effect of this cannot be positive because it creates avenues for dissipation and leaks in the knowledge acquisition and dissemination cycle. In this work we propose a development model that looks at KMS from the mobility angle enhancing previous designs of mobile KMS (mKMS) and KMS. We used a SOA based Smart Client Architecture to provide a new view of KMS with capabilities to actually manage knowledge. The model was implemented and tested as a small scale prototype to show its practicability. This model will serve as a framework and a guide for future designs

Enabling the compatible evolution of services based on a cloud-enabled ESB solution

Software services are susceptible to changes because of the rapid growth and challenges in business environment. Business operations offered by service providers have to able to cope with various and countless service demands from service consumers. Such a case could also be experienced in cloud environment. As cloud platform, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform allows application developers as tenants to deploy and configure their service artifacts in cloud infrastructure. A multi-tenant aware Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as applications integrator is introduced to serve tenants in terms of management and administration. The purpose is to ensure data isolation between tenants. The goal of this diploma thesis is to extend an open source multi-tenant aware ESB with service version control management framework so that the ESB can facilitate the version management of service providers and consumers in a transparent manner, and ensure service compatibility among tenants. The extension can be further decomposed in terms of management and administration, as well as message flows in versions inside the multi-tenant ESB

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura IntegradaThis thesis addresses the device lifecycle support thematic in the scope of service oriented industrial automation domain. This domain is known for its plethora of heterogeneous equipment encompassing distinct functions, form factors, network interfaces, or I/O specifications supported by dissimilar software and hardware platforms. There is then an evident and crescent need to take every device into account and improve the agility performance during setup, control, management, monitoring and diagnosis phases. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is currently a widely endorsed approach for both business and enterprise systems integration. SOA concepts and technology are continuously spreading along the layers of the enterprise organization envisioning a unified interoperability solution. SOA promotes discoverability, loose coupling, abstraction, autonomy and composition of services relying on open web standards – features that can provide an important contribution to the industrial automation domain. The present work seized industrial automation device level requirements, constraints and needs to determine how and where can SOA be employed to solve some of the existent difficulties. Supported by these outcomes, a reference architecture shaped by distributed, adaptive and composable modules is proposed. This architecture will assist and ease the role of systems integrators during reengineering-related interventions throughout system lifecycle. In a converging direction, the present work also proposes a serviceoriented device model to support previous architecture vision and goals by including embedded added-value in terms of service-oriented peer-to-peer discovery and identification, configuration, management, as well as agile customization of device resources. In this context, the implementation and validation work proved not simply the feasibility and fitness of the proposed solution to two distinct test-benches but also its relevance to the expanding domain of SOA applications to support device lifecycle in the industrial automation domain

The Impact of Service-Oriented Architecture on Business Networkability

Increased networking among firms has become a competitive necessity in many industries and the ability to efficiently establish, operate and dissolve business relationships has become a competitive advantage. The degree of this networkability is influenced by several factors, such as organizational structure, business processes, people and culture, but also information systems. In fact, current technological developments aim at the efficient and flexible orchestration of standardized modules, referred to as services. Past research has analyzed networkability primarily qualitatively without providing a specific perspective on the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) which has only emerged on a broad scale since the beginning of this century. This paper is a first attempt to investigate the impact of SOA on the notion of business networkability. It is assumed that the ability to flexibly link business services among business partners also positively influences the firm’s networkability. Empirical evidence will be provided from the financial industry which is currently undergoing a strong vertical disintegration. The results show a moderate, but nevertheless significant impact