Title: Circumstantial-evidence-based effort judgement for web service composition-based SOA implementations

Authors: Zheng Li; Liam O'Brien; He Zhang

Addresses: School of Computer Science, Australian National University (ANU), CSIT Building (108), ANU, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia; National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA), 7 London Circuit, Canberra City, ACT 2601, Australia. ' School of Computer Science, Australian National University (ANU), CSIT Building (108), ANU, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia; eResearch, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), 1 Wilf Crane Crescent, Yarralumla, ACT 2600, Australia. ' School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Building K17, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia; National Information and Communications Technology Australia (NICTA), 13 Garden Street, Eveleigh, NSW 2015, Australia

Abstract: Considering web service composition (WSC) has increasingly become a significant practice in SOA implementations, WSC-based SOA projects would be particularly worth more attention. However, effort estimation for WSC-based SOA implementations may suffer from challenges because of the numerous and various approaches to WSC. This paper proposes circumstantial-evidence-based effort judgement as a supplementary to expert judgement to achieve qualitative effort comparison between different implementation proposals of a WSC-based SOA project. In detail: 1) Through viewing WSC-based SOA system from a perspective of mechanistic organisation, we borrow divide-and-conquer (D&C) as the generic strategy to narrow down the problem of effort judgement for the entire SOA implementation to that for individual WSCs. 2) Benefiting from an effort-oriented classification matrix, we identify a set of effort factors for individual WSC approaches. 3) By analogy, we apply the evidence concept and judgement method in forensic science to the context of effort judgement, and finally realise the qualitative effort judgement for WSC-based SOA implementations.

Keywords: service-oriented architecture; SOA; web service composition; WSC; divide-and-conquer; D&C; effort judgement; effort checklist; web services.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2012.045563

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2012 Vol.2 No.1, pp.31 - 44

Received: 04 Jul 2011
Accepted: 21 Nov 2011
Published online: 20 Sep 2014 *

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