Circumstantial-evidence-based effort judgement for web service composition-based SOA implementations

Considering web service composition (WSC) has increasingly become a significant practice in SOA implementations, WSC-based SOA projects would be particularly worth more attention. However, effort estimation for WSC-based SOA implementations may suffer from challenges because of the numerous and various approaches to WSC. This paper proposes circumstantial-evidence-based effort judgement as a supplementary to expert judgement to achieve qualitative effort comparison between different implementation proposals of a WSC-based SOA project. In detail: 1 Through viewing WSC-based SOA system from a perspective of mechanistic organisation, we borrow divide-and-conquer (D&C) as the generic strategy to narrow down the problem of effort judgement for the entire SOA implementation to that for individual WSCs. 2 Benefiting from an effort-oriented classification matrix, we identify a set of effort factors for individual WSC approaches. 3 By analogy, we apply the evidence concept and judgement method in forensic science to the context of effort judgement, and finally realise the qualitative effort judgement for WSC-based SOA implementations.