SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis

Chapter 9. BOTTOM-UP SERVICE DISCOVERY PATTERN

To enable reuse of legacy applications and services for future implementations, the Bottom-Up service discovery pattern is devised to incorporate ready-made software solutions that have been proposed, designed, and constructed for past projects and business initiatives. It calls for a service identification process that begins with the inspection of existing software artifacts, such as source code, application components, architecture blueprints, and enabling middleware technologies. Therefore, consider the Bottom-Up service discovery effort as a vital pattern that can facilitate identification of services by starting from existing software entities that have been road tested, withstood market volatility, and endured technical challenges. Moreover, the chief goal of the Bottom-Up discovery pattern is to contribute to reduction of organizational expenditure by focusing on repurposing legacy executables, reconciling software products, and minimizing functionality redundancy.

Analysis of the software products that have been operating in production environments and the assessment of their possible contribution to a future project is a good start. It must be followed by discovering new services that can fill in the implementation gaps and offer the missing capabilities that are required to meet new business requirements and technical specifications. That is, the missing functionality should be assigned to new services that are devised to ...