Semi-Automated Lifecycles for Eliciting Requirements for Service-Oriented Environments

Abstract

Service-based tools are beginning to mature, but there is a cognitive gap between the understanding of what currently exists within an organization and how to use that knowledge in planning an overall enterprise modernization effort that realizes a service-oriented architecture. Traditional and contemporary software engineering lifecycles use incremental approaches to extract business information from stakeholders in developing features and constraints in a future application. In traditional environments, this information is captured as requirements specifications, use cases, or storyboards. Here, we address the evolution of traditional software engineering approaches to support the conceptualization of abstract services that overlap multiple organizations. Traditional software engineering lifecycles must be enhanced with emerging processes related to the development applications for service-oriented environments. The chapter discusses state-of-the-art approaches that elicit information about the requirements for service-oriented architectures. These approaches tend to leverage existing requirements engineering approaches to suggest aggregate service-based capabilities that might be most effective for a particular environment.