Discovering and Deriving Service Variants from Business Process Specifications

Abstract

Software service organizations typically develop custom solutions from scratch in each project engagement. This is not a scalable proposition, since it depends too heavily on labor alone. Rather, creating and reusing software "assets" is more scalable and profitable. One prevalent approach to building software solutions is to use service-oriented architecture (SOA) to compose software services to support business processes. In this context, the key to reusing assets is to discover (from existing assets in a portfolio) or derive service variants to meet the requirements of a stated business process specification. To that end, this paper presents our Variation-Oriented Service Design (VOSD) algorithm for the same. Via IBM's Rational Software Architect modeling tool, we also demonstrate the practical usefulness of our algorithm via a prototype implementation in the insurance domain.

Formalizing Service Variability Modeling in SOA-Based Solutions

“…Now, such an analysis for example, could ensure that all considered services contain non-conflicting variations, before engineering them into the derivation of respective process variants. In [21], we presented an algorithm to generate service variants from business process specifications without such a formal verification. The operators also enable analysis of existing variants, as well as modification thereof in response to changing requirements.…”

“…In particular, our investigations will focus on automated cross-verification techniques [12] for verifying the correctness of generated variants that can be selected for integrating into SOA-based solutions as per Theorem 4. For this, we will be enhancing our earlier service variant derivation algorithm from [21] using the properties of our variability algebra. We will also be investigating the approach presented in [1] for automated variability artifact composition to automatically compose service variants to develop business process variants.…”

“…In our earlier work [20] we proposed a methodology called "variation oriented engineering" for generating controlled variations of individual services and business processes from consumption perspectives. In [21] we addressed the derivation and selection of service variants to support the required changes in a business process specification model. In [19] we formalized the notion of variability model in a SOA-based solution.…”

Integrated Asset Analysis Framework for Model-Driven Development of SOA Based Solutions

“…Performing a manual validation of the appropriateness of these assets for a solution context is one of the factors that make architects to go for development from scratch. In our earlier work, [7], we defined a business process consisting (a) a set of associated service models, (b) data dependencies between the services based on the execution of preceding services (produced data dependencies), (c) data dependencies between the services based on the input model of preceding services (received data dependencies), and (d) control flow dependencies that provides the choreography of the services. Extending this modeling representation for searching existing assets, the second phase of algorithm proceeds as follows: Task models execute base search aided with the set of input and output data models.…”