A Practical Tool for Automating Service Oriented Software Product Lines Derivation

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a business driven architecture that supports business strategies and goals. In enterprise systems, it offers flexibility for building IT solutions that can respond rapidly to changing business requirements and technology. The success of a service-oriented application implementation is measured by the level of flexibility, extendibility and customization in the provided services. In effect, it raises variability management concerns that require a good understanding of the business domain and a careful design of the application artifacts to cater for various service consumers' demands and requirements. Many approaches and frameworks have been proposed to realize variability in SOA by applying the concept of Software Product Lines (SPL) where services are the core assets and each member of the service-oriented product line is a possible assembly of those services. However, there are few tools that support these approaches and ease the derivation process of member applications taking into consideration the variability from different perspectives. In this paper we present a tool that facilitates the automatic derivation of SOA applications based on Model Driven Engineering (MDE) as an implementation methodology. The tool is based on the Multiple-Views Service-Oriented Product Line Variability approach. The tool architecture as well as its implemented modules is first described. Then, an example in the e-health domain is presented.