Model-Driven Engineering of Service-Oriented Systems: A Research Agenda

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are an essential platform to provide infrastructures that support widespread collaboration between organizations. These service-oriented systems are a new context for software developers, who must now be equipped with new development methods and technologies. This new context has specific requirements, such as better collaboration and communication between business users and software engineering across organizations and increased agility of the development and maintenance processes to better respond to newly emerged or changed requirements. In this paper, the authors present a research agenda that looks at the use of a novel software engineering discipline—model-driven engineering. By switching the focus from low-level technical details to high-level problem-specific details, model-driven engineering addresses challenges in the development of service-oriented systems. This paper particularly discusses the approach to the development of service-oriented systems based on business process modeling, which integrate business vocabularies and rules in different stages of the development lifecycle. Here, model-driven engineering can provide many promising solutions.