Successful research
Thomas Ziebermayr finished his doctoral thesis entitled „A Framework for Enhanced Service Reuse in an industrial SOA-Context"
The research topic
The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm has evolved from hype to an important basis for development of complex enterprise applications. Companies have realized that applying a SOA brings advantages for application development. Although the usage of foreign services is not established until now, the usage in a company internal context promises improvement of application development. In a company internal context the company keeps control over services and their evolution Reuse of software was always beside handling of complexity a driving factor of development paradigms and technology. But until now the reuse of software is not applied sufficiently. The SOA paradigm also aims on reuse of software, but on a different level than component based technologies or object orientation. Although a service is reusable by definition, it is not ensured that services are reused.
ESR-Framework
To avoid that the advantage of reusability is not utilized sufficiently various tasks, activities and tools are necessary.This work provides a framework that enhances the reuse of services within a company, the Enhanced Service Reuse-Framework (ESR-Framework).This framework is a collection of concepts and tools for various parts of the service life cycle that supports the development of reusable services and the reuse of those services. The administration of the service portfolio is also part of this framework as well as quality assurance. The ESR-Framework complements the standard SOA and service development process to enhance service reuse.
Different parts
The ESR-Framework consists of various parts.
- The first part aims on improving the service offer, as this is the basis of a SOA and reuse is only possible if reusable services are available. This is supported by service design support, separation of reuse concerns from service design, support for service publication and organization of projects that allows budget for reuse issues.
- The second part aims on increasing the services usage. This is realized by enhancing service search, improvement of service documentation and the definition of responsibilities, support for service integration and appropriate usage and special support for service customization.
- The third part of the framework extends SOA Governance by service reuse governance to steer service development and evolution.
- Another part of the framework defines a service description model that is the basis for service documentation, search and administration. The description model bases on requirements derived from an abstract service development process that is aligned to the context of this work. Service Versioning is also part of the ESR-Framework and especially addresses evolution issues in the deployment context.
The last part of the framework defines comprehensive support for service integration and assurance of appropriate service usage.This work not only proposes a framework for reuse enhancement of services, it furthermore describes how this framework is implemented and used. The last part of this work shows how the ESR-Framework enhances reuse and compares it to other work.