Exploring service-oriented system engineering challenges: a systematic literature review

Service-oriented system engineering (SOSE) has drawn increasing attention since service-oriented computing was introduced in the beginning of this decade. A large number of SOSE challenges that call for special software engineering efforts have been proposed in the research community. Our goal is to gain insight into the current status of SOSE research issues as published to date. To this end, we conducted a systematic literature review exploring SOSE challenges that have been claimed between January 2000 and July 2008. This paper presents the results of the systematic review as well as the empirical research method we followed. In this review, of the 729 publications that have been examined, 51 were selected as primary studies, from which more than 400 SOSE challenges were elicited. By applying qualitative data analysis methods to the extracted data from the review, we proved our hypotheses about the classification scheme. We are able to conclude that the SOSE challenges can be classified along two dimensions: (a) based on themes (or topics) that they cover and (b) based on characteristics (or types) that they reveal. By analyzing the distribution of the SOSE challenges on the topics and types in the years 2000-2008, we are able to point out the trend in SOSE research activities. The findings of this review further provide empirical evidence for establishing future SOSE research agendas. © The Author(s) 2009