Supervising the evolution of web service orchestrations using quality requirements

  • Authors:

  • Chouki Tibermacine;Tarek Zernadji

  • Affiliations:

  • LIRMM, CNRS and Montpellier-II University, France;Computer Science Department, University of Biskra, Algeria

  • Venue:
  • ECSA'11 Proceedings of the 5th European conference on Software architecture
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Since many years, Web services have confirmed their status of one of the most pertinent solutions for a given service provider, like Google, Amazon or FedEx, to open its solutions for third party software development. New business logic can be implemented through orchestrations of existing Web services. This helps development teams in capitalizing resources held by the providers of these services. Nonetheless, these service-oriented software architectures, like any other software artifact, are subject to changes during their lifecycle, and thus can undergo an evolution phenomenon. In this phenomenon, it is argued that quality can be weakened after successive changes (Lehman's 7th law of software evolution), and this is mainly due to the lack of architecture documentation and tool support to supervise architecture changes. In this paper, we present an approach to supervise the evolution of Web service orchestrations, with quality requirements considered as a support documentation. First, we show how important design decisions, like the choice of a service-oriented architecture pattern can be formalized as a documentation for the quality they implement. Then, we detail how this documentation can be used to supervise architecture changes. In this way, the impact of changes made on a software architecture are analyzed on-the-fly to determine which quality is affected.