Service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) framework

The gap between business decision making and software engineering causes inefficiency and quality problems in software development. Software engineers do not understand organization's value creation objectives and their influence on software production and structure. For this reason software does not fulfil the requirements of business and software quality is inadequate too often. Our objective in the service-oriented software engineering project (SOSE) is to develop methods and tools to improve quality and profitability of software development. In this paper. we describe SOSE framework and clarify with examples its phases, utility, and application in pilot projects. SOSE framework's first activity is to create a well-defined business case. Then, business processes and data concepts are identified, to meet business requirements of the business case, and modelled with informal diagrams like UML and BPML. Finally, the refinement continues with use case maps, system-level services, and business service components. We propose that service, process, entity, and utility components are used as design elements of the business service component. In implementation we utilize platform independent and platform specific models. This study has been carried out in co-operation with ICT companies and their customers in electricity domain in Finland.