Role of Process Modeling in Software Service Design

Abstract

Service-oriented architecture technically facilitates business process management as it enables software to evolve along with changing business processes by simply recomposing software services. From a theoretical point of view it is, thus, natural to take business processes as a starting point for software service design. However, deriving software services strictly top-down from business processes is awkward from a practical point of view: The resulting services are too fine-grained in scope and too vast in number, and particular process control flows become cemented in service orchestrations. In this paper, another approach of software service design is described that, though starting from process models, avoids these drawbacks. The approach is illustrated by a practical example. The presented service design approach has been successfully applied in industry for more than 14 years and enables agile service implementation.

A method to identify services using master data and artifact-centric modeling approach

“…The SIMs described in [12], [13], [22], [23], [24] decompose business processes into workflows and then they identify which tasks are implemented by existing applications, in order to define which services will be created from scratch or exposed from the applications. However, these SIMs fail in providing guidelines to aid the decision of which operations should compose a service.…”

“…This strategy is the most aligned with the enterprises reality, since it considers existing software assets and quickly delivers recognizable benefits without neglecting the fact that services are designed for reuse and must be aligned with the business context. Nevertheless, according to current SIMs surveys ( [5], [6], [15], [17], [20], [27], [28]), only few methods can be classified as Meet in the middle [1], [3], [12], [13], [14], [21], [22], [23], [24]. All of them use processes as inputs to elicit business perspective.…”

Putting the Customer Back in the Center of SOA with Service Design and User-Centered Design

“…individual services). It helps adapt software to changes in business processes and thus provides an excellent way to develop applications for supporting business processes [4,17,19]. However, use of this model alone does not ensure customer friendliness to an application developed with the help of the SOA.…”