Evolvability Characterization in the Context of SOA

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style which promotes reuse of self-contained services. These self-contained services allow a better consideration of software quality characteristics as they can be independently analyzed. In our work, the evolvability quality characteristic has been considered, due to its impact in the stages of Maintenance and Evolution (M&E) for the software enterprises. Three goals are underlined in this paper: first, the relationship between SOA and quality characteristics focusing on a precise definition of evolvability of a software product from the SOA perspective, second a M&E model for SOA, and finally, some experiences are presented in order to assess evolvability in real software products. Two case studies have been executed: the first one analyzing the evolvability of the OSGi framework. And in the second case, the model is used in local Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), where an improvement process has been executed.