Measuring the Portability of Executable Service-Oriented Processes

Abstract

A key promise of process languages based on open standards, such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language, is the avoidance of vendor lock-in through the portability of process definitions among runtime environments. Despite the fact that today, various runtimes claim to support this language, every runtime implements a different subset, thus hampering portability and locking in their users. In this paper, we intend to improve this situation by enabling the measurement of the degree of portability of process definitions. This helps developers to assess their process definitions and to decide if it is feasible to invest in the effort of porting a process definition to another runtime. We define several software quality metrics that quantify the degree of portability a process definition provides from different viewpoints. We validate these metrics theoretically with two validation frameworks and empirically with a large set of process definitions coming from several process libraries.

Portability of Process-Aware and Service-Oriented Software : Evidence and Metrics

“…Introduction International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA), Kauai, Hawaii, USA, December 16 -18, 2013, Awarded Best Conference Paper, [79] 9. Lenhard J.: Towards Quantifying the Adaptability of Executable BPMN Processes, Proceedings of the 6th Central-European Workshop on Services and their Composition (ZEUS), Potsdam, Germany, February 20 -21, 2014, [80] 10. Harrer S., Lenhard J., Wirtz G., van Lessen T.: Towards Uniform BPEL Engine Management in the Cloud, Proceedings of the CloudCycle14 Workshop, Stuttgart, Germany, September 22, 2014, [81] 11.…”

“…Process languages may support either or both of these styles and process models can be transformed from a block-structured to a graph-oriented style and the other way round [139]. The Travel Grant Process taken from [80] in Graph-Oriented Notation…”

“…Fig. 2.8 depicts a fictional exemplary process model, taken from [80], in a graph-oriented style in the BPMN notation. This process model implements the handling of a travel grant application at a university department.…”

Portability in clouds: approaches and research opportunities

“…Problem definition. As stated earlier, portability is the ability to move software assets among different runtime platforms without having to rewrite them partly or fully (enhancement of the definition given by Lenhard and Wirtz [9]). If the Cloud portability is achieved, data, application or service components can be moved and reused regardless of the operating system, storage or application programming interface (API).…”

“…SaaS openness of the source code, openness of standard data formats, integration technologies and application server or operating system. Lenhard and Wirtz [9] have define software quality metrics in order to quantify the degree of portability of an executable service-oriented process. They have map existing metrics for program portability to service and process-oriented programs and they have combined the metrics with empirical data on language support in various runtimes.…”