Needs of Service Identification for Service-Oriented Business Process Management

Since the trend of adopting SOA into enterprise applications, the needs for definition and identification of services have been recognized. There is a growing body of research carried out on the identification of different types of services. Identifying right granularity services is important: if the service is of large size, it goes against the reusability principle of SOA, whereas if the service is of small size, then it causes unnecessary computing power for implementing any business functions. Without a formal (semi)- automatic approach to identify services, it is difficult in migrating existing systems into service-oriented systems. This paper explores the need for service identification for service-oriented business process management systems. The current approaches, techniques and methods of service identification are reviewed, and limitations of the each approach is analysed. New requirements and techniques are demonstrated in creating improved dynamic services with consideration for interoperability, modularity, reusability within information environment

Automated Service Identification Methods: A Review

Service identification represents the first phase in service modelling, a necessary step in SOA. This research study reviewed and analyzed the issues related to automation issues of service identification. However, the importance of service identification methods’ (SIM) automation and their business alignment are emphasized in literature, reviewing existing service identification methods (SIMs) reveals the lack of business alignment, automation as challenging issues. We close the gap by proposing ASIF which relies on automating the SIMs’ steps to identify business aligned services based on business processes and business goals

The two cultures and the internet revolution

The service-orientation paradigm has not only become prevalent in the software systems domain in recent years, but is also increasingly applied on the business level to restructure organisational capabilities. In this paper, we present the results of an extensive literature review of 30 approaches related to service identification and analysis for both domains. Based on the consolidation of a superset of comparison criteria for service-oriented methodologies found in related literature, we compare and evaluate the different characteristics of service engineering methods with a focus on service analysis. Although a close business and IT alignment is regarded as one of the core beneficial promises of service-orientation, our analysis suggests that there is a lack of unified, comprehensive methodology for service identification and analysis integrating and addressing both domains. Thus, we discuss how our results can inform directions for future research in this area

A Case Study in Matching Service Descriptions to Implementations in an Existing System

A number of companies are trying to migrate large monolithic software systems to Service Oriented Architectures. A common approach to do this is to first identify and describe desired services (i.e., create a model), and then to locate portions of code within the existing system that implement the described services. In this paper we describe a detailed case study we undertook to match a model to an open-source business application. We describe the systematic methodology we used, the results of the exercise, as well as several observations that throw light on the nature of this problem. We also suggest and validate heuristics that are likely to be useful in partially automating the process of matching service descriptions to implementations.Comment: 20 pages, 19 pdf figure

VORGEHENSMODELLE ZUR ENTWICKLUNG SERVICEORIENTIERTER SOFTWARESYSTEME

Bei der Entwicklung von Softwaresystemen auf Basis eines serviceorientierten Architekturparadigmas stellt sich die Frage, welches Vorgehensmodell zur Projektabwicklung herangezogen werden kann. In der Literatur werden unterschiedliche Vorgehensmodelle zur serviceorientierten Softwareentwicklung vorgeschlagen. Aus diesen werden 17 Modelle ausgewählt, charakterisiert sowie mit Hilfe eines allgemeinen Rahmens klassifiziert und verglichen. Dabei werden sowohl generelle Merkmale von Vorgehensmodellen als auch SOA-spezifische Vorgehensmerkmale herangezogen

COBOL systems migration to SOA: Assessing antipatterns and complexity

SOA and Web Services allow users to easily expose business functions to build larger distributed systems. However, legacy systems - mostly in COBOL - are left aside unless applying a migration approach. The main approaches are direct and indirect migration. The former implies wrapping COBOL programs with a thin layer of a Web Service oriented language/platform. The latter needs reengineering COBOL functions to a modern language/ platform. In our previous work, we presented an intermediate approach based on direct migration where developed Web Services are later refactored to improve the quality of their interfaces. Refactorings mainly capture good practices inherent to indirect migration. For this, antipatterns for WSDL documents (common bad practices) are detected to prevent issues related to WSDLs understanding and discoverability. In this paper, we assess antipatterns of Web Services’ WSDL documents generated upon the three migration approaches. In addition, generated Web Services’ interfaces are measured in complexity to attend both comprehension and interoperability. We apply a metric suite (by Baski & Misra) to measure complexity on services interfaces - i.e., WSDL documents. Migrations of two real COBOL systems upon the three approaches were assessed on antipatterns evidences and the complexity level of the generated SOA frontiers - a total of 431 WSDL documents.Fil: Mateos Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Andrés Pablo. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Facultad de Informática. Departamento Ingeniería de Sistemas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte; ArgentinaFil: Misra, Sanjay. Atilim University; Turquía. Covenant University; Nigeri

TOWARDS A FINANCIALLY OPTIMAL DESIGN OF IT SERVICES

The current financial crisis forces companies to allocate IT budgets more effectively and thus increases the demand for suitable methods to evaluate the financial impact of IT investments. This especially applies to service-orientation, a design paradigm which facilitates the standardisation and flexibilisation of business processes and IT applications, topics that currently are very much in vogue in science and practice. This paper focuses on the realisation of a new functionality by IT services and presents a methodology to determine their financially optimal functional scope on the continuum between realising just one IT service providing the whole functionality and realising many IT services each providing only a small share of functionality. This approach allows for a multi-period financial valuation of an uncertain demand for the new functionality, as well as of an uncertain company-wide reuse of the corresponding IT services. Finally, the methodology is evaluated by an example from a financial services provider