Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

Discovery and Selection of Certified Web Services Through Registry-Based Testing and Verification

Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relationships among peers in a Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO), especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises where economic benefits can be directly at stake. This paper presents a novel approach towards effective service discovery and selection that is no longer based on informal, ambiguous and potentially unreliable service descriptions, but on formal specifications that can be used to verify and certify the actual Web service implementations. We propose the use of Stream X-machines (SXMs) as a powerful modelling formalism for constructing the behavioural specification of a Web service, for performing verification through the generation of exhaustive test cases, and for performing validation through animation or model checking during service selection

Size Matters: Microservices Research and Applications

In this chapter we offer an overview of microservices providing the introductory information that a reader should know before continuing reading this book. We introduce the idea of microservices and we discuss some of the current research challenges and real-life software applications where the microservice paradigm play a key role. We have identified a set of areas where both researcher and developer can propose new ideas and technical solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1706.0735

Computerization of workflows, guidelines and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems

There is a need to integrate the various theoretical frameworks and formalisms for modeling clinical guidelines, workflows, and pathways, in order to move beyond providing support for individual clinical decisions and toward the provision of process-oriented, patient-centered, health information systems (HIS). In this review, we analyze the challenges in developing process-oriented HIS that formally model guidelines, workflows, and care pathways. A qualitative meta-synthesis was performed on studies published in English between 1995 and 2010 that addressed the modeling process and reported the exposition of a new methodology, model, system implementation, or system architecture. Thematic analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and data visualisation techniques were used to identify and cluster the underlying implementation ‘challenge’ themes. One hundred and eight relevant studies were selected for review. Twenty-five underlying ‘challenge’ themes were identified. These were clustered into 10 distinct groups, from which a conceptual model of the implementation process was developed. We found that the development of systems supporting individual clinical decisions is evolving toward the implementation of adaptable care pathways on the semantic web, incorporating formal, clinical, and organizational ontologies, and the use of workflow management systems. These architectures now need to be implemented and evaluated on a wider scale within clinical settings

Extending OWL-S for the Composition of Web Services Generated With a Legacy Application Wrapper

Despite numerous efforts by various developers, web service composition is still a difficult problem to tackle. Lot of progressive research has been made on the development of suitable standards. These researches help to alleviate and overcome some of the web services composition issues. However, the legacy application wrappers generate nonstandard WSDL which hinder the progress. Indeed, in addition to their lack of semantics, WSDLs have sometimes different shapes because they are adapted to circumvent some technical implementation aspect. In this paper, we propose a method for the semi automatic composition of web services in the context of the NeuroLOG project. In this project the reuse of processing tools relies on a legacy application wrapper called jGASW. The paper describes the extensions to OWL-S in order to introduce and enable the composition of web services generated using the jGASW wrapper and also to implement consistency checks regarding these services.Comment: ICIW 2012, The Seventh International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, Stuttgart : Germany (2012