On managing evolution of configurable services based on configurable processes

Abstract

Today, SOA is the most dominant and broadly adopted architecture style by enterprises. It defines how to use services to achieve business goals, and allows interoperability with multiple customers within different business domains. The growing use of SOA has increased research interest on how to improve the reuse of services. Hence, managing services variability was introduced by many approaches as a new leading edge concept for improving reuse. Indeed, variability refers to the characteristic of a system to adapt, specialize and configure itself with the context of use. Several proposals have been made in this respect. However, none of these seem to deal with the evolution of these configurable services. In service oriented systems, the evolution of services is usually introduced by the evolution of the associated business process. Therefore, if a configurable process model (CPM for short) should evolve in reaction to changing business needs, the associated configurable services (CS for short) are also impacted by this change. In our previous work, we proposed a complete methodology for managing evolution in configurable process models. In this paper, we extend our proposed approach to develop an evolution process for managing the changes of configurable services (variable services) caused by changing the associated configurable process model.