An Approach for Developing Service Oriented Product Lines

Service Orientation (SO) is a relevant promising candidate for accommodating rapidly changing user needs and expectations. Adopting SO in practice for real software and system development, however, has uncovered several challenging issues, such as how to identify services, determining configurations of services that are relevant to users' current context, and maintaining system integrity after configuration changes. In this paper, we propose a method that addresses these issues by adapting a feature-oriented product line engineering approach. Our method is based on the feature analysis technique that enables us to identify services of a service oriented system. The method is notable in that it guides developers to identify services at the right level of granularity, to map users' context to relevant service configuration, and to maintain system integrity in terms of invariants and pre/post conditions of services. We also propose a heterogeneous style based architecture model for developing such systems.