A Requirements Analysis Framework for Development of Service Oriented Systems

Abstract

In Service Oriented Systems (SOS), implementation of business processes is accomplished through services in distributed, loosely coupled manner based on business process requirements of the users. Consequently, importance of businessprocess requirements analysis for development of SOS is strongly highlighted in both academia and industry. Usually, traditional requirements engineering is competent enough to specify and analysis business requirements for development of software systems efficiently. However, Service Oriented Requirement Engineering (SORE) emerging for SOS development is differed from traditional requirement engineering due to complex nature of services. Yet, a serious gap is still exist between early and detailed specification of business process requirements in SORE and further mapping towards design of SOS from set of business processes. To address this issue, in this paper, a requirements analysis framework is proposed for development of SOS systems. The contribution of the proposed work is formal representation of business process requirements for SOS based on business scenario and Cause-Effect-Dependency (CED) graph in dimensions of six aspects of services -- What, Why, How, Who, When and Where (5W1H). Both early and detailed level requirements analysis in the context of SORE is facilitated by the proposed approach. Beside, traceability of proposed approach towards design of business processes for development of SOS is also exhibited in this paper. Moreover, the practical utility of the proposed approach is demonstrated using a suitable case study.