Crucial Service-Oriented Antipatterns

Service-oriented architecture is now the most popular software engineering concept. Software related antipat-terns – commonly used seemingly good but in fact wrong solutions – can have adverse consequences of varying im-portance. It implies that the use of an antipattern can and should be viewed as a risky event. It follows that some principles of risk management can be used. We propose a method based on slightly simplified procedures of risk management and assessment. Using the procedures we give a short list of the most risky antipatterns, i.e., antipat-terns occurring very often and having crucial consequences and present principles of antipattern refactoring. We dis-cuss the following crucial antipatterns: No Legacy (de-velopment from scratch), Standardization Paralysis, Busi-ness Process for Ever (Full Automation), Sand Pile (too fine grained services), On-Line Only (No Batch Systems). The discussion of antipatterns is based on a long-term experi-ence with service-oriented and service-oriented like (e.g., process control) systems and on the analysis of practice. Contributions of the paper: evaluation of antipatterns as risky events, specification the properties of service-oriented systems in small firms and in e-government, differences be-tween object-oriented and service-oriented antipatterns, re-quirements on service interfaces, and the list of the service-oriented antipatterns being the most important ones accor-ding to the evaluation