Role of Process Modeling in Software Service Design

Service-oriented architecture technically facilitates business process management as it enables software to evolve along with changing business processes by simply recomposing software services. From a theoretical point of view it is, thus, natural to take business processes as a starting point for software service design. However, deriving software services strictly top-down from business processes is awkward from a practical point of view: The resulting services are too fine-grained in scope and too vast in number, and particular process control flows become cemented in service orchestrations. In this paper, another approach of software service design is described that, though starting from process models, avoids these drawbacks. The approach is illustrated by a practical example. The presented service design approach has been successfully applied in industry for more than 14 years and enables agile service implementation.