A systematic survey of service identification methods

Abstract

One of the major challenges for the adoption of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the service identification phase that aims to determine which services are appropriate to be implemented. In the last decade, several service identification methods (SIMs) were proposed. However, the service identification phase still remains a challenge to organizations due to the lack of systematic methods and comprehensive approaches that support the examination of the businesses from multiple perspectives and consider service quality attributes. This work aims to provide an overview of existing SIMs by detailing which service's perspectives, stated as relevant by the industry, are addressed by the SIMs and also by synthesizing the identification techniques used by them. We have performed a systematic survey over publications about SIMs from 2002 to June 2013, and 105 studies were selected. A detailed investigation on the analyzed SIMs revealed that the identification techniques applied by them have a correlation on how they address many of the service's perspectives. In addition, they are supporting the SOA adoption by handling many perspectives of the OASIS' reference architecture for SOA. However, most of them do not explicitly address service quality attributes and few studies support the evaluation of both. Therefore, future research should follow the direction toward hybrid methods with mechanisms to elicit business and service's quality attributes.