Review of Relevant System Development Life Cycles (SDLCs) in Service-Oriented Software Engineering (SoSE)

Service-oriented software engineering (SoSE) is a new paradigm for building software systems, fostered by the availability of a new -but already mature- computing technology based on services. SoSE advances the current object-oriented and the component-based software engineering paradigms. Under that new paradigm, multiple software-system development life cycle (SDLC) methodologies have been proposed; however, none of them have gained a total acceptance as the dominant SDLC in SoSE. On this theoretical and practical situation, we believe that a research is required to reach more standardized and stabilized knowledge about SDLCs in SoSE. Thus, this article reviews nine recent SDLCs proposed for SoSE with the aim to present a descriptive-comparative landscape of a relevant range of SDLCs for SoSE. Such description-comparison is guided by two criteria: (i) the extent of completeness of each SDLC, with respect to the proposed phases, activities and delivered artifacts, and (ii) the extent of the Boehm-Turner's Rigor-Agility balance. Our results suggest that only three of the nine SDLCs studied already provide the best level of completeness and Rigor-Agility. Finally, we consider that the reported descriptive-comparative framework and their findings from each SDLC can be useful also for comparing and elaborating future SDLCs in SoSE.