Method Engineering: A Service-Oriented Approach - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 330

The chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces the service paradigm
and it relates it to the component one, the service paradigm is also discussed in
the context of method engineering. Section 3 is an overview of the conceptual ele-
ments of SO2M. Section 4 presents the ontology of method, Sect. 5 describes the
specification model for method services and Sect. 6 introduces the composition pro-
cess. Section 7 concludes and discusses new challenges for service-oriented method
engineering.
2 The Service Paradigm
This section introduces the concept of service, we identify the principles that
characterize this concept and compare to the concept of component.
For the majority of computer scientists, both in academics and in industry, the
term service is associated with those of Web service and service-oriented architec-
ture [ 22] . However the concept of service can be considered in many ways. The
special issue of the Communications of the ACM Journal [ 4] illustrates the scope
and challenges of this area: “The challenges are both the multidisciplinary nature of
service innovation, which combines business, technology, social-organizational, and
demand innovation as well as the lack of formal representation of service systems”.
In this chapter, we consider services as existing method components that can be
assembled to deliver a method fragment that satisfy a developer's need. This vision
leads naturally to consider services as a particular kind of component. In the next
section, we show the essential differences between these two concepts.
2.1 From Components to Services
Recently, several paradigms have influenced IS engineering (ISE) methods, tech-
niques and tools. Component-based software engineering (CBSE) and service-
oriented engineering (SOE) can be considered as such paradigms. Some confusion
exists between those approaches due to the idea that both utilize some kind of com-
ponents as fundamental constructs to support the development of IS. Furthermore,
both reorganize a portfolio of existing artifacts into self-describing elements,
accessible through standard interfaces and that can be assembled together.
Early component-based software engineering has emerged as a new paradigm for
supporting software reuse [8, 12] . The basic concept of systematic software reuse
is simple [ 17] : develop systems of components of a reasonable size and reuse them
then, extend the idea of “component systems” beyond code to requirements analysis,
design models and tests artifacts and also to development process.
Service-oriented engineering involves services as the constructs to bear the devel-
opment of distributed applications with rapid and easy composition of services.
Key to this concept is the service-oriented architecture (SOA) which is a logical