TITLE:
Towards Enhanced Program Comprehension for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Systems
AUTHORS:
Eman El-Sheikh, Thomas Reichherzer, Laura White, Norman Wilde, John Coffey, Sikha Bagui, George Goehring, Arthur Baskin
KEYWORDS:
Service Oriented Architecture; Software Maintenance; Program Comprehension; Intelligent Search; Abstraction; Visualization; Web Services
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.6 No.9,
August
19,
2013
ABSTRACT:
Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an emerging paradigm for orchestrating software
components to build new composite applications that enable businesses,
government agencies and other organizations to collaborate across institutional
boundaries. SOA offers new languages and a variety of software development
tools that enable software engineers to configure software as services and to
interconnect services with other services independent of differences in
operating platform and programming and communicating languages. However, SOA composite applications introduce additional
complexity into the construction, deployment and maintenance of software, for
the purpose of aggravating the issue of program comprehension, which is at the
heart of software maintenance. This article describes the challenges in SOA
program comprehension and reports on the results of a two-part case study aimed
at identifying information that would help a SOA software maintainer. Analysis
of the results indicates a need for higher-level abstractions and visualizations that can enhance conventional text-based search to support SOA program
understanding. This paper then reports on several specific abstractions,
visualization methods, and the development of an intelligent search tool to enhance
comprehension of the relationships and data within a SOA composite application.