CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become a dominant approach for developingdistributed enterprise-wide applications. Most organizations capitalize on SOA by discovering andreusing services already accessible over the Internet. In addition to functional requirements, theimplementation of a SOA design must consider quality-attribute properties (e.g., performance,interoperability or security, among others), which require developers to explore and assesscandidate solutions fulfilling the same functional requirements. This exploration is usually drivenby architectural knowledge and SOA principles, but it can be a time-consuming and error-proneprocess, even for expert developers. To deal with this issue, we present a case-based reasoningapproach called AWESOME to assist developers in exploring different development alternatives,by modeling quality-attribute aspects and SOA design patterns as cases.To evaluate our approach, we built a prototype of AWESOME and conducted four case-studiesto obtain several object-oriented implementations. The level of assistance of AWESOME wasassessed by computing different metrics (e.g., precision, recall, accuracy, and normalizeddiscounted cumulative gain) of the solutions suggested by the tool and the acceptable solutionsprovided by test subjects (i.e. SOA experts). The main contribution of this work is thedevelopment of a case base that puts SOA and quality-attribute knowledge to practical usage.Furthermore, we enrich the case base with mappings that explicitly link SOA and object-orientedpatterns to quality-attribute goals. This quality-attribute perspective of SOA design usingknowledge-based tools is a relatively unexplored research field. Our results showed thatAWESOME is effective to assist developers in terms of generating SOA implementation thatmatch the quality-attribute properties associated to the original architectural specification.