Designing service-based applications in the presence of non-functional properties: A mapping study

Abstract

ContextThe development of distributed software systems has become an important problem for the software engineering community. Service-based applications are a common solution for this kind of systems. Services provide a uniform mechanism for discovering, integrating and using these resources. In the development of service based applications not only the functionality of services and compositions should be considered, but also conditions in which the system operates. These conditions are called non-functional requirements (NFR). The conformance of applications to NFR is crucial to deliver software that meets the expectations of its users. ObjectiveThis paper presents the results of a systematic mapping carried out to analyze how NFR have been addressed in the development of service-based applications in the last years, according to different points of view. MethodOur analysis applies the systematic mapping approach. It focuses on the analysis of publications organized by categories called facets, which are combined to answer specific research questions. The facets compose a classification schema which is part of the contribution and results. ResultsThis paper presents our findings on how NFR have been supported in the development of service-based applications by proposing a classification scheme consisting in five facets: (i) programming paradigm (object/service oriented); (ii) contribution (methodology, system, middleware); (iii) software process phase; (iv) technique or mathematical model used for expressing NFR; and (v) the types of NFR addressed by the papers, based on the classification proposed by the ISO/IEC 9126 specification. The results of our systematic mapping are presented as bubble charts that provide a quantitative analysis to show the frequencies of publications for each facet. The paper also proposes a qualitative analysis based on these plots. This analysis discusses how NFR (quality properties) have been addressed in the design and development of service-based applications, including methodologies, languages and tools devised to support different phases of the software process. ConclusionThis systematic mapping showed that NFR are not fully considered in all software engineering phases for building service based applications. The study also let us conclude that work has been done for providing models and languages for expressing NFR and associated middleware for enforcing them at run time. An important finding is that NFR are not fully considered along all software engineering phases and this opens room for proposing methodologies that fully model NFR. The data collected by our work and used for this systematic mapping are available in https://github.com/placidoneto/systematic-mapping_service-based-app_nfr.