Naveen N. Kulkarni

SOAF: An Architectural Framework for Service Definition and Realization

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is an approach for building distributed systems that deliver application functionality as a set of self-contained business-aligned services with well-defined and discoverable interfaces. This paper presents a systematic and architecture-centric framework, named service oriented architecture framework (SOAF), to ease the definition, the design and the realization of SOA in order to achieve a better business and IT alignment. The proposed framework is business-process centric and comprises a set of structured activities grouped in five phases. It incorporates a range of techniques and guidelines for systematically identifying services, deciding service granularity and modeling services while integrating existing operational/legacy systems. The results from a pilot validation of SOAF for SOA enablement of a realistic securities trading application are presented. Best practices and lessons learned are also discussed

The Role of Service Granularity in a Successful SOA Realization A Case Study

This paper presents the case study of a leading US financial Institution International Financial and Brokerage Services (IFBS), which faced SOA realization issues while it followed an inappropriate SOA design strategy. While riding on the SOA hype wave, it implemented thousands of fine grained Web-services without paying much heed to issues like governance, and usage within its business processes. IFBSpsilas service portfolio comprises of a gamut of services which although on paper looked good, but presented a lot of challenges in their usage and maintenance. We address some of these issues in this paper and present our framework for SOA adoption (called INSOAP) which can be effective in a similar end- to-end SOA adoption exercise in an enterprise.

Service Design Process for Reusable Services: Financial Services Case Study

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach for building distributed systems that deliver application functionality as a set of business-aligned services with well-defined and discoverable contracts. This paper presents typical a service design process along with a set of service design principles and guidelines for systematically identifying services, designing them and deciding the service granularity and layering. The advocated principles stem from our experiences in designing services for a realistic Securities Trading application. Best practices and lessons learned during this exercise are also discussed.

A Model Driven Service Identification Approach for Process Centric Systems

The raison dpsilaetre for Web-services is that they could be used to compose new services. As in process centric systems, wherein blocks of software implement a functional domain through a set of linked activities, a SOA based system modeled through Web-services, requires business services (of low granularity) which implement various business functions. Such business services could not only ensure a high degree of re-use but could also help in realizing service oriented architecture in its true sense. Although today quite a few approaches for the problem exist, but most of them are bottom up solutions, or mainly focus on domain decomposition and composite service formation. Not many of them have yet utilized the full potential of business processes, which form the backbone of any enterprise. In this work we define what a business service would be like, vis-a-vis its corresponding business function, and how it could be realized through data, utility, information and other services. We present our service identification approach which utilizes process maps and service hierarchies and towards the end we discuss some of our current work in building an automation tool (named SQUID) for service identification.

Evaluation of Strategies for Integrating Legacy Applications as Services in a Service Oriented Architecture

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is an approach for building distributed systems that deliver application functionality as a set of self-contained business-aligned services. It promises lower integration costs, increased reusability and improved enterprise agility and adaptability. One of the key obstacles for SOA is the presence of existing legacy applications that support critical business processes but are inflexible and hard to adapt for integration with other business applications. This paper presents a survey of key approaches to integrate/transform legacy applications into services to participate in an enterprise-wide SOA. It also presents a decision framework to guide architects in selecting the optimal combination of legacy modernization options

CoDesign: a highly extensible collaborative software modeling framework

Large, multinational software development organizations face a number of issues in supporting software design and modeling by geographically distributed architects. To address these issues, we present CoDesign, an extensible, collaborative, event-based software modeling framework developed in a distributed, collaborative setting by our two organizations. CoDesigns core capabilities include real-time model synchronization between geographically distributed architects, as well as detection and resolution of a range of modeling conflicts via several off-the-shelf conflict detection engines.

Information as a Service in a Data Analytics Scenario - A Case Study

In this work we present a case study of a SOA realization exercise at a business information provider firm, which deals with disparate sources of data in-order to provide reliable reports to its clients. Unlike typical enterprise scenarios, where applications are required to be service enabled, the key requirement here was to service enable its data acquisition, quality check, reporting and other processes which are either mostly manual or ETL based workflows. This paper also addresses how shared services, business processes, rules, and semantics are used to provide quality and agility to the internal processes many of which are entirely dependent on the type of data received. The case and the scenario are chosen specifically to emphasize the fact, that mere web-services implementation does not lead to service oriented architecture, but it is the appropriate usage of them.

Web services: e-commerce partner integration

Online retailers have used a succession of technologies to showcase their products and services on the Web. That experience gives them a greater insight into what it is that the latest technology, Web services, can offer them. This article gives a brief survey of the evolution of evolving e-commerce technologies, explaining what each offered and could not offer to retailers. It then describes how Amazons investment in its e-commerce services (ECS) gives Amazon partners access to common online retailing functionalities. These researchers also present the partner integration framework they developed to help retailers define what services they need in an online retail system.

How software architects collaborate: Insights from collaborative software design in practice

The increasingly complex software systems are developed by globally distributed engineering teams consisting of a number of members who collaborate to gather the requirements, as well as design, implement, and test the system. Unlike other development activities, collaborative software design has not yet been studied extensively, and thus it is not fully understood how it is conducted in practice. We have commenced a series of studies to address this. As the first step, we have interviewed architects at a global software solutions provider to observe how collaborative software design works in practice. In this paper, we report the observations and insights we gained from the interviews related to (1) the various roles of software architects in collaborative software design, (2) the project-specific networks of software architects, (3) the impacts of geographic distribution, and (4) the collaboration cost drivers. We also discuss how we are using these insights to shape up our subsequent research.

Structural evolution of software: a social network perspective

Structural evolution of an object oriented software is studied using a class collaboration network. The emergence of scale-free property in this network from what could be a random network suggests an inherent process of structural optimization. In the past, software evolution was studied using object oriented metrics. But, these metrics limit our understanding of structural evolution because they are object-class centric and do not take into account the complex relations that span across the structure. As an initial attempt, we apply the social network theories to uncover this hard-to-understand yet essential process of structural evolution. We discuss our findings related to the occurrences of complex relations and influential object-classes that resist the optimization. We do so by observing the revisions chosen at different stages of evolution from open-source software projects.