Dagstuhl Seminar 09021: Software Service Engineering Executive Summary

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) constitutes an important, standards-based and technology-independent distributed computing paradigm and architectural style for discovering, binding, assembling, and publishing loosely-coupled and network-available software services. With SOA-enabled applications operating in highly complex, distributed, and heterogeneous execution environments, SOA practitioners encounter the limits of traditional software engineering. In this Dagstuhl seminar, we have discussed and explored the fundamental tenets underpinning the development and maintenance of SOA systems. As a result of our discussions, we position software service engineering as an evolving and converging discipline that embraces the open world assumption. Software service engineering entails a departure from traditional software engineering disciplines such as component-based development, supplementing them with techniques and patterns tailored to service enablement, composition, and management.