SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis

Chapter 20. STRUCTURAL SPECIFICATION ANALYSIS PROCESS AND MODELING PATTERNS

Unlike the structural generalization practice (discussed in Chapter 19) that promotes the broadening of a service internal structure, the structural specification method advocates dissecting a service into smaller and more manageable units of analysis. Furthermore, this process introduces a set of best practices devised to facilitate decomposition, retirement, substitution, or swapping of service capabilities. These modeling operations obviously attend to the architecture best practices that encourage breaking up an overly coarse-grained service to promote loosely coupled service formations.

Structural specification is also about source code, design, and architecture refactoring. The term "refactoring" pertains to the enhancement of a service structure by analyzing first its internal formation to propose a better architecture solution and improve performance and reuse. This venture includes the utilization of modeling operations that are applied to remove impractical implementations or optimize their structures. In addition, the refactoring process may be pursued to update a service's dated capabilities and technologies or to swap aggregated services between two or more containing entities, such as composite services and service clusters.

This chapter introduces four methods and affiliated patterns that can assist practitioners with service decomposition and internal service component manipulation to optimize ...