No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is an emerging paradigm for developing software systems that employ services. Presently there is already much research effort in the areas of service discovery and orchestration, business process modelling, and the semantic web. While these are all important aspects for moving towards the pervasive adoption of SOC, most existing work assumes the existence of black box services, with little attention given to how such services might be developed in a systematic manner. Furthermore, a precise description of what constitutes a service-oriented system is yet to be formally defined, and the overall impact of service-orientation on the software design process is not well understood. Therefore, this work presents a formal model covering design artefacts in service-oriented systems and their structural and behavioural properties. The model promotes a better understanding of service-oriented design concepts, and in particular, enables the definition of software metrics in an unambiguous, formal manner. Defining such a model and metrics is an initial step towards deriving a comprehensive service-oriented software design methodology.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a promising approach for developing enterprise applications. While the concept of SOA has been described in research and industry literature, the techniques for determining optimal granularity of services and encapsulating business logic in software are unclear. This paper explores this problem using a case study developed with two contrasting approaches to building enterprise applications that utilise services, where one of the approaches employs coarse-grained services developed based on the principles of Object-Orientation (OO), and another approach is based on embedding business rules and logic into executable BPEL scripts and constructing a system as a set of fine-grained services. The quantitative comparison based on a set of mature software engineering metrics showed that a system developed using the BPEL-based approach has a potentially higher structural complexity, but at the same time lower coupling between software modules compared to an OO approach. It was also shown that some of the existing software metrics are inapplicable to SOA, hence new metrics need to be developed.

No abstract

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a promising paradigm for developing enterprise software systems. The initial concepts of service-orientation have been described in the research and industry literature and software tools for assisting in the development of Service-Oriented (SO) applications are becoming more widely used. Nonetheless, a precise description of what constitutes a SO system is yet to be formally defined, and the design principles of SOC are not well understood. Therefore, this paper proposes a formal mathematical model covering design artefacts in service-oriented systems and their structural and behavioural properties. This model promotes a better understanding of SO concepts, and in particular, enables the definition of structural software metrics in an unambiguous, formal manner. Finally, although the proposed model is generic, it can be customised to support particular technologies as shown in this paper where the model was tailored for BPEL4WS implementation.

With a new wave of demand for information technology (IT) staff, it is time for the IT community to discover what competencies are needed for IT workers in the new millennium. Most organizations have outsourced their IT projects to low-cost centers in developing countries, and this has changed expectations about local workersorganizations need, and expect, to employ highly skilled IT professionals. This article draws on the competency model to explore what competencies are needed to successfully equip the IT workforce. This research uses the example of IT architects to illustrate how to use the competency model to identify important sets of competencies. We interview professional architects, analyze the content of the discussions and derive a list of fourteen competency attributes important to IT architects. Some competencies are easy to develop, others are difficult to change, and this has implications for university education and industry hiring. This article also discusses the general use of competency models for IT workforce training and selection.