Developing Service-Oriented Applications: a method engineering based approach

The Service-Oriented paradigm, which conceives software resources as discoverable services available on a network, is proving an effective approach for providing business solutions in distributed and heterogeneous computing environments. However, due to the different and numerous issues to face, it is witnessing a growing interest in the use of methodologies suitable for supporting the development of service-oriented applications. The paper proposes an approach, centered on the Method Engineering paradigm, which enables the definition of new methodologies tailored to address specific issues arising in developing of service-oriented applications through the exploitation of fragments of methodologies existing and experimented. In particular, it is shown how to obtain, through composition of method fragments, a complete process which covers from requirements specification to testing of service-oriented applications. The complete definition of a method fragment (MF-Web Services Builder) and a related CASE tool are also presented along with a case study showing their exploitation for building a real service.