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enterprise, and the implementation of the services
should be prioritized to support the incremental
transformation of the enterprise. (Bieberstein et
al., 2006; Cherbakov et al., 2005)
In this chapter, we propose Qualitative Service
Elicitation, QSE, a new systematic method to be
used in service elicitation. QSE provides practical
means to prioritize and identify reusable service
candidates in an enterprise context. The method
is presented with an example of how to apply it
in a sample project. The method is also tested in a
real world project, and a case study of the project
is provided.
service compositions and links the compositions
to service candidates identified in the projects.
Similarly, QSE provides practical means to build
an enterprise level service catalogue, which can be
used in gap analysis. Additionally, the catalogue
provides a ground for refining the right granularity
of the services. The method itself does not provide
automation in the analysis, but provides systematic
procedures for the analysis, thus helping to reduce
human errors. To enable systematic analysis, we
have taken ingredients from research methodol-
ogy. We believe service elicitation by nature much
resembles qualitative research.
The identification of services has been studied
for some time and various methods already exist,
but they focus on specific areas and the elicitation
of specific types of services. A survey by Ramol-
lari et al. (2007) lists ten different methods with
varying coverage of the SOA project life cycle.
Arsanjani (2005) classifies the SOA approaches
into six categories: business process driven, tool-
based MDA, wrap legacy, componentized legacy,
data driven and message driven approaches.
The existing approaches can be used to elicit
certain types of services, but fail to provide a
generic solution. SOMA combines features also
from other disciplines, but it can be seen more
as a collection of methods than a single method
(Arsanjani et al., 2008). QSE borrows elements
suitable for top-down analysis from several of the
approaches above. QSE is a top-down analysis
method, which starts from business process de-
scriptions and digs down to the essentials of the
service candidates with the help of business use
cases. Elements from the existing process driven,
data driven and message driven methods have
been included in QSE.
QSE is meant only to analyze business pro-
cesses, not to design them. Completely different
approaches, such as The MIT Process Handbook
(Walker, 2006), are needed for designing business
processes.
THE CHALLENGE OF
SERVICE ELICITATION
The service oriented approach differs funda-
mentally from the conventional development
paradigms in the key concept of dynamically
accessible services. The scope and performance
of services are under constant development to
support an increasing number of consumers.
Components and objects do not provide this
kind of run-time flexibility. Likewise, traditional
requirement engineering practices do not support
service composition nor do they encourage the
identification of reusable services. (Papazoglou,
Traverso, Dustdar, Leymann, & Kramer, 2006;
Van Nuffel, 2007; Zimmermann, Schlimm, Waller,
& Pestel, 2005)
Papazoglou et al. (2006) have listed the main
challenges of the service-oriented engineering do-
main in their research roadmap. Novel approaches
are required in service engineering to address the
current challenges and to provide sound methods
that allow enterprises to design and deploy services
more efficiently while adapting to the changes
matching the rate and pace of the business.
The QSE approach addresses some of the
challenges identified by Papazoglou et al. (2006).
For example, QSE supports the refinement of
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