Workshop on Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines (SOAPL)—Enhancing Variation

Description

The Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines (SOAPL) 2009 Workshop is the third workshop to examine the connection between service-oriented architecture and software product line approaches. While the first two workshops examined the connection between the approaches and the experience of integrating them, this workshop will examine how the two techniques benefit each other.

Workshop Presentations

2009 Workshop on Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines (SOAPL 2009): Enhancing Variation
Bob Krut and Sholom Cohen
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Context Setting for Afternoon Discussion
Sholom Cohen
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Service Oriented Product Line Engineering (A Negotiation Framework for Service-Oriented Product Line Development)
Jaejoon Lee
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Managing SOA System Variation through Business Process Lines and Process Oriented Development
Nicola Boffoli, Marta Cimitile, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Giuseppe Visaggio
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Towards an Approach for Service-Oriented Product Line Architectures
Flávio Mota Medeiros, Eduardo Santana de Almeida,
Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira
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Semantic Variability Modeling for Multi-staged Service Composition
Bardia Mohabbati, Nima Kaviani, Dragan Gasevic
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Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software Product Lines:
Pre-Implementation Decisions
Dennis Smith, Grace Lewis
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Motivation

Product lines and service-oriented architecture are approaches to meet a common business goal—reuse—using the same functionality in multiple contexts.  In the case of product lines, reuse happens by using a “core asset” (could be a hardware or a software product) in multiple systems of a family of products (e.g., cell phone or medical records management systems). Uses of core assets vary depending on the system context. In a service-oriented system, reuse happens by using the same business functionality in multiple process, workflow, or application contexts.

Product line development is a proven approach that has been adopted by key industry players. On the other hand, although industry has accepted the benefits of a service-oriented approach for systematic reuse, the implementation methods are still new and emerging.

The SOAPL Workshop gives participants an opportunity to examine how the two techniques benefit each other.

Objectives

This workshop will build on the results of the SOAPL 2007 Workshop: Service-Oriented Architectures and Product Lines - What Is the Connection? and the SOAPL 2008 Workshop: Service-Oriented Architectures and Product Lines – Putting Them Together. This year’s workshop, SOAPL 2009, will explore how service-oriented architectures and software product lines can benefit from each other, specifically

- how service-oriented systems can benefit from software product lines' variation management approaches to identify and design services targeted to multiple service-oriented systems

- how software product lines can benefit from service-oriented architectures by employing services as a mechanism for variation within a product line

Topics and Intended Audience

Topics of interest for the workshop include both research and practitioner perspectives.

From a research perspective, how can these two reuse approaches benefit from each other?

1. Using service orientation in a product line: 
   a. implementing the software core assets of the product line as services
   b. using service invocation as a variation mechanism
   c. using service-oriented approaches to support end-user variations
   
   
2. Using product line concepts in a service-oriented context:
   a. using concepts of variability and commonality analysis to understand and model requirements variability that will eventually help identify the right set of services that can be used in multiple contexts/environments
   b. once the variability and commonality in services have been identified, engineering this variability into the services
   c. exploiting variation points for service versioning, which is a major problem in service-oriented systems, both at design time and runtime

From the practitioner perspective, three topics of interest are

1. What product line practices have been used to successfully govern assets that were created using a service-oriented approach?
2. What approaches have worked (and not worked) in the migration of legacy software to services for use in multiple applications?
3. What are the underlying infrastructures that support product lines based on implementations of service-oriented architecture?

Participants in SOAPL 2009 will include research and practitioners who have experience in service-oriented architecture, software product lines, and variation management issues.

Submissions

Prospective participants must submit a five-to-eight-page position paper or experience report that pertains to the workshop topics listed. Papers should be in the IEEE Computer Society Conference Format for 8.5x11-inch Proceedings Manuscripts.

All submissions will be reviewed by members of the program committee for quality and relevance.  Accepted papers will be published electronically in the conference proceedings. Three or four papers will be chosen to be presented during the workshop to foment discussion. 

Important Dates

Submit your paper in PDF form to soa-workshop@sei.cmu.edu by June 1, 2009. Notifications of paper or experience report acceptance will be sent by June 15, 2009.
Camera-ready copies are due July 1, 2009.

Format and Program

The workshop will be highly interactive and focus on determining how best to integrate service-oriented architecture and product line practices.  The morning session will feature invited speakers and selected presentations based on position papers. Participants in the afternoon session will be assigned to working groups that cover specific topics of interest. After the workshop, the leader of each working group will be asked to write a summary of the working group’s discussion and (especially) its conclusions.

Contact Information

For more information, contact

Robert Krut
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone: +1-412-268-8505
Fax:     +1-412-268-5758
Email: rk@sei.cmu.edu

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University.