A Method for Component-Based and Service-Oriented Software Systems Engineering

Information technology (IT) and systems have become the backbone of modern enterprises providing a wealth of new opportunities for conducting business. The ability of an enterprise to manage the complexity of its information systems and rapidly adapt to business changes has been widely recognized as a crucial factor for business success. There is a growing consensus in the business/IT community that the way to create these complex and adaptive IT systems is to use components and services discrete units of business functionality that collaborate over contract-based interfaces using standard protocols and platforms. During the last few years, a variety of component-based development (CBD) and Web services (WS) technology and standards have been proposed for building complex enterprise-scale systems and providing effective inter-enterprise application integration. While the technology and implementation standards for CBD and WS have already been established in practice, further efforts are necessary to design methods and techniques for engineering these complex systems. The first proposed CBD methods inherited difficulties in recognizing the fundamental nature of components as design structures and treated components as software code packages. The CBD methods of a new generation have recently started to define components as the representation and implementation of autonomous business units. However, business components are often identified based on underlying business objects and, therefore, they are too fine-grained and data-oriented to be used effectively in the design and development of complex, Web-based and service-oriented applications.Technology, Policy and Managemen