Without careful methodological guidance, case studies in software engineering are difficult to plan, design and execute. While there are a number of broad guidelines for case study research, there are none that specifically address the needs of a software engineer undertaking multiple case studies in an industrial setting. Through a synthesis of existing best practices in case study research, we provide a set of comprehensive guidelines for conducting multiple case studies in software engineering research. Our guidelines can assist software engineering researchers with all stages of multiple case study research, although in this paper we concentrate on the early phases, such as focusing the case study and detailed plan design. To date, three exploratory research projects found our guidelines very useful. We illustrate our guidelines with examples from one of these projects.

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We present our policy-based middleware, called Manageable and Adaptive Service Compositions (MASC), for dynamic self-adaptation of Web services compositions to various changes. MASC integrates and extends our earlier middleware called the Web Services Message Bus (wsBus). In particular, we discuss MASC support for customization of Web services compositions to address business exceptions and wsBus support for correction (fault management) of Web services compositions to improve reliability. We have evaluated the former support on a stock trading case study and the latter support on a supply chain management case study. Our solutions are complementary to the existing approaches and provide: coordination of fault management between SOAP messaging and business process orchestration, greater diversity of monitoring and control constructs, specification of both technical and business aspects used for adaptation decisions, higher level of abstraction easier for use by non-technical people, and externalization of monitoring and adaptation actions from definitions of business processes.