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The purpose of this paper is to consider the method engineering perspective for service-oriented system engineering (SOSE). A number of SOSE methods have been proposed in both academia and industry. Given this, many intuitive, common questions arise. To answer these questions, many comparison frameworks have been developed. Each of which has considered certain methodological perspectives. However, less attention has been given to the method engineering (ME) perspective. The authors argue that this perspective would answer the question “what ME to apply in order to produce SOSE methods that themselves produce quality services at different levels of abstraction and SBAs”. This research question is further decomposed into other questions; the main one is “whether the existing ME do apply to service orientation”. Answering such a question would lead to either developing SOSE methods by using the existing ME or developing a new ME or framework for the specifics of SOSE.

This work first provides a literature review on ME approaches and techniques; then, it compares a sample of existing SOSE methods with respect to their ME within a comparison framework that comprises a set of relevant properties of a solution that would be provided by an SOSE method, namely, service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption, quality of services and ME; and finally, it discusses the applicability of the existing ME to SOSE.

Strengths and weaknesses of the existing methods with respect to the aforementioned criteria, in addition to SOSE methodology open issues, were identified. The comparison has shown that while the existing SOSE methods have proved their success in a specific task, they still present some weaknesses. Therefore, it is better to benefit from the advantages of the existing ME techniques, notable method fragments, even if they need some alteration.

While this work has many open issues related to SOSE methods with respect to ME, it could be further developed in many directions by exploring the open issues. For instance, the generation of a new ME technique and application of this new ME technique to the existing SOSE methods to see to what extent the existing methods may be situational.

This work has practical implications, as it provides a better understanding of different views of SOSE methods, and assists the method engineers in deciding which ME technique is most suitable to their situation.

The produced artifact provides a research roadmap toward SOSE ME.

None of the existing comparison frameworks for SOSE methods has considered the criteria such as SOA adoption and ME techniques. Indeed, ME techniques and approaches would allow better reuse of the existing proven fragments of methods.

Many service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) methods from industry and academia claim their compliance with SOA and SO, but there is a lack of framework to assess the existing methods or to provide new ones. First, the paper questions: (Q1) to what extent an approach would consider the three aspect: service, composition, and management to deliver software solutions that are conformed to SO and SOA principles; (Q2) to what extent an approach would consider the aggregates of a method, including representation techniques, assisting tools, and inspection techniques to assess the delivered solution (service and composition), in addition to the process; and (Q3) to what extent an approach would consider the alignment of business and IT through the application of model-driven development by using standards such as model-driven architecture. Then, the paper compares four generic approaches: top-down, bottom-up, green-field, and meet-in-the-middle, within a framework, to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the paper aims to propose a business-oriented approach that focuses on the value a business can add to its customers, whereby the value must be specified in a contract to be largely re-used.

This work develops a framework as an abstract model for SOSE generic methods. Then, it uses the framework as an analytical study to compare the generic methods and come up with research issues and a new method for SOSE.

A set of guidelines that a SOSE method develops should consider when selecting or developing a new method.

Comparison of existing SOSE methods within the findings of the proposed framework. The paper has theoretical implications as the open issues provide a research roadmap towards the realization of SOA in accordance with a maturity model.

This has practical implications as it: provides a better understanding of the approaches, as they are ambiguously used by the existing methods; and assists developers in deciding an approach having the necessary knowledge related to its process, strengths and weaknesses.

None of the existing comparison framework has raised the level of abstraction up to generic methods such as top-down, green-filed, meet-in-the-middle and bottom-up.

More and more organizations make parts of their information systems available to their business partners and often face integration and interoperability issues. To counter these problems, web services appeared as a promising technology to bridge the gap between organizations and their partners. While web services generally focus on the implementation of functional concerns (FC) such as ordering of goods, the reservation of flights, etc. also non‐functional concerns (NFC) such as security, reliable messaging, performance, and availability have to be addressed appropriately. The purpose of this paper is to identify web services' requirements.

In this paper the authors provide a survey on works in the area of NFCs in web services. After presenting a common terminology, the most important requirements in that context are presented. Further, the authors assess these works against the requirements.

The evaluation reveals that there is no approach that supports the requirements to a satisfying degree. Based on that, the authors motivate the need for a novel holistic approach to NFCs in web services.

The paper presents an extended version of one of the papers presented at iiWAS2010.

Web services composition engineering (WSCE) is a big challenge because of the increasing complexity, openness and extensibility of services based on the information system (IS). In the absence of an adequate framework for IS engineering, the authors assume that the overall problem is consequently no longer easy to resolve. This paper aims to explore some of the issues underlying WSCE through a framework, which is built based on the state of the art. The proposed framework is structured around five views that mainly highlight aspects of personalization and security concerns. The main objectives of this framework are: to help understand and clarify the basics of the WSCE domain; to evaluate web services composition (WSC) methods; to analyze and compare existing personalization, secure methods and identify new research axes; and to identify the main criteria of the ongoing approach for the design of a secure IS based on personalized WSC.

This work develops a framework that is used as an analytical study to compare the existing WSCE methods and come up with research issues. Then, the proposed framework is considered as an abstract model for the new WSCE approach.

A set of criteria that the proposed framework should consider when developing a new approach to a secure IS based on personalized WSs composition.

The paper has theoretical implications as the personalization and security issues provide a research roadmap toward the realization of an approach for the design of a secure IS based on personalized WSs composition.

As proof, the authors are interested in a web services repository of a real mall. To do this, the authors deployed the application in a cloud environment and observed the results of personalization and security concepts in WSCE.

None of the existing comparison frameworks has raised both personalization and security issues in WSs composition, while personalization and security must be present in the whole composition process.

The paper aims to address the issue of Web service providers facing a major issue of estimating the potential effects of changing a Web service to other services, especially in large ecosystems of Web services which have become more common nowadays. Web service providers make constant changes to their Web services to meet the ever-changing business requirements.

The paper proposes an approach to predict change impact by mining a version history of a Web service ecosystem. The proposed approach extracts patterns of Web services that have been changed together from the version history by using association rule data mining techniques. The approach then uses this knowledge of co-changed patterns for predicting the impact of future changes based on the assumption that Web services which have been changed together frequently in the past will likely be changed together in future.

An empirical validation based on the Amazon’s ecosystem of 46 Web services indicates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. After an initial change, the proposed approach can correctly predict up to 25 per cent of further Web services to be changed with the precision of up to 82 per cent.

Traditional approaches to predict change impact in Web services tend to rely on having a dependency graph between Web services. However, in practice, building and maintaining inter-service dependencies that capture the precise semantics and behaviours of the Web services are challenging and costly. The proposed approach offers a novel alternative which only requires mining the existing version history of Web services.

A mature adoption of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) goes steadily through different levels of maturity, whereby each level has its own types of services (e.g. software services or business services). However, the identification of such services is not an easy task even though there exist many service identification methods (SIMs). This paper aims to propose a new approach to select SIMs. The proposed selection approach for SIMs uses the desired SOA maturity level as the main guidance to assist the organizations in selecting a suitable SIM for each level of SOA maturity.

The methodology consists of three activities: surveying and selecting a suitable evaluation framework for SIMs, surveying and selecting a suitable SOA maturity model (SOAMM) and using the selected evaluation framework to decide a suitable SIM for the desired SOA maturity level with respect to the selected SOAMM.

Welke’s SOAMM and two existing evaluation frameworks for SIMs were found suitable to validate the proposed selection approach for SIMs. The two selected frameworks utilized the proposed selection approach to different degrees. To fully utilize the proposed selection approach, a comprehensive evaluation framework is required that addresses the most significant aspects of the existing SIMs.

In this research, the authors propose a new way of using Welke’s SOAMM to guide the organizations in selecting a suitable SIM from the existing evaluation frameworks for SIMs based on the desired SOA maturity level. In addition, the proposed selection approach improves the applicability of the existing evaluation frameworks, as it provides the organizations with a new way to select the methods.

Business process has become the core assets of many organizations and it becomes increasing common for most medium to large organizations to have collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative dimension to process mining in which the objective is to extract process constraints (or business rules) as opposed to business process models. It also focusses on an alternative data set – process models as opposed to process instances (i.e. event logs).

The authors present a new method of knowledge discovery to find business activity sequential patterns embedded in process model repositories. The extracted sequential patterns are considered as business rules.

The authors find significant knowledge hidden in business processes model repositories. The hidden knowledge is considered as business rules. The business rules extracted from process models are significant and valid sequential correlations among business activities belonging to a particular organization. Such business rules represent business constraints that have been encoded in business process models. Experimental results have indicated the effectiveness and accuracy of the approach in extracting business rules from repositories of business process models.

This research will assist organizations to extract business rules from their existing business process models. The discovered business rules are very important for any organization, where rules can be used to help organizations better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty.

There has very been little work in mining business process models as opposed to an increasing number of very large collections of business process models. This work has filled this gap with the focus on extracting business rules.

Today’s in-demand skills may not be needed tomorrow. As companies are adopting a new group of technologies, they are in huge need of information technology (IT) professionals who can fill various IT positions with a mixture of technical and problem-solving skills. This study aims to adopt a sematic analysis approach to explore how the US Information Systems (IS) programs meet the challenges of emerging IT topics.

This study considers the application of a hybrid semantic analysis approach to the analysis of IS higher education programs in the USA. It proposes a semantic analysis framework and a semantic analysis algorithm to analyze and evaluate the context of the IS programs. To be more specific, the study uses digital transformation as a case study to examine the readiness of the IS programs in the USA to meet the challenges of digital transformation. First, this study developed a knowledge pool of 15 principles and 98 keywords from an extensive literature review on digital transformation. Second, this study collects 4,093 IS courses from 315 IS programs in the USA and 493,216 scientific publication records from the Web of Science Core Collection.

Using the knowledge pool and two collected data sets, the semantic analysis algorithm was implemented to compute a semantic similarity score (DxScore) between an IS course’s context and digital transformation. To present the credibility of the research results of this paper, the state ranking using the similarity scores and the state employment ranking were compared. The research results can be used by IS educators in the future in the process of updating the IS curricula. Regarding IT professionals in the industry, the results can provide insights into the training of their current/future employees.

This study explores the status of the IS programs in the USA by proposing a semantic analysis framework, using digital transformation as a case study to illustrate the application of the proposed semantic analysis framework, and developing a knowledge pool, a corpus and a course information collection.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.