Engineering Service Engagements via Commitments

A service engagement describes how two or more independent parties interact with each other. Traditional approaches specify these interactions as message sequence charts (MSCs), hiding underlying business relationships, and consequently complicating modification. We present Comma, a commitment-based approach that produces a business model drawn from an extensible pattern library, and which yields flexible MSCs. An empirical study shows that models produced via Comma yield superior flexibility (measured objectively), comprehensibility by others (measured subjectively), and take less time (measured objectively) and effort (measured subjectively) to produce