Software Service Engineering: Tenets and Challenges

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) constitutes a modern, standards-based and technology-independent paradigm and architectural style for distributed enterprise computing. The SOA style promotes the publishing, discovery, and binding of loosely-coupled, network-accessible software services. With SOA systems operating in distributed and heterogeneous execution environments, the engineers of such systems are confined by the limits of traditional software engineering. In this position paper, we scrutinize the fundamental tenets underpinning the development and maintenance of SOA systems. In particular, we introduce software service engineering as an emerging discipline that entails a departure from traditional software engineering disciplines, embracing the ‘open world assumption’. We characterize software service engineering via seven defining tenets. Lastly, we survey related research challenges.