Portability and Compatibility of service-oriented Software

Service-oriented architectures enable the cooperation of today’s increasingly heterogeneous systems. They allow the construction of more complex but flexible and agile systems through the composition of basic services. This forms a value-adding way of reusing systems.

One of the most central promises of service-oriented architectures is the robustness of services in the face of heterogeneous environments. Services compatibility and portability are of utmost importance.

Today, simple scenarios can be implemented on the basis of the international standards of the Web Services ecosystem. But taking into account further non-functional requirements or process-aware programming languages, today’s systems quickly reach their limits, as runtime environments partly deviate from existing standards. This severely complicates the development of truly compatible and portable services. The aim of this research area is to improve the current situation by making the quality properties portability and compatibility measureable for service-oriented systems. The central research question is:

What are the properties that constitute portable and compatible services and how can these properties be measured?

The work builds on software quality standards of ISO/IEC that are currently under development. Portability and compatibility are interrelated with a variety of additional quality properties, such as installability, replaceability, adaptability, interoperability, and co-existence. In the context of this research area, metrics for the measurement of these properties for service-oriented systems are developed and validated formally as well as evaluated practically.


Participants:

Jörg Lenhard
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Guido Wirtz