Architecture Views Illustrating the Service Automation Aspect of SOA

Service-Oriented architecture (SOA) as an emerging architecture style has been widely adopted in the industry. Due to the heterogeneous, dynamic and open nature of services, architecting ServiceBased Applications (SBAs) poses additional concerns as compared to traditional software applications. Hence, for SOA architects it is of great importance that their concerns are appropriately addressed in the architecture description. However, an effective and systematic way of documenting SOA design is currently missing. In this work, we focus on the service automation aspect of SOA. We carried out two large case studies to learn the industrial needs in illustrating services deployment and configuration automation, from now on service automation. As a result, we broke down service automation into three important sub-aspects, and we developed a corresponding set of architecture views (automation decision view, degree of service automation view and service automation related data view) that expresses the different concerns of stakeholders who share interest in service automation. This set of views adds to the more traditional notations like UML, the visual power of attracting the attention of their users to the addressed concerns, and assist them in their work. This is especially crucial in service oriented architecting where service automation is highly demanded.