Quality-aware Service-Oriented Software Product Lines: Feature-Driven Process Configuration and Optimization

Research initiative in Service-Oriented Computing aims at developing adaptable and scalable distributed applications and addressing challenges such as application integration, reusability, modularity, and interoperability. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an architectural style enables organizations to offer their application functionality as a service and enhance the adaptability to changes of new requirements of stakeholders, i.e., service consumers. Nowadays enterprises and service providers face several challenges to develop SOA-based solutions. They indispensably require to effectively manage variability in both functional and non-functional (quality) requirements at the business process level to rapidly and cost-effectively develop and deploy customized services that best meet the stakeholders' feature needs. SOAs provide the architectural underpinnings to support software reuse and enable variability at both design and run-time; however, they lack support to manage variability that promotes configurability and customization. Variability modeling and management have been the core research subjects in Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) with the objective of addressing the issues of engineering and developing software-intensive systems. Combining SPLE and SOAs has been a subject of considerable research interest in recent years to develop highly configurable software systems.In this thesis, we adopt a product-line approach in the service domain and hypothesize that the SPLE paradigm, enabling variability management and systematic planned reuse, can be applied orthogonally to aid Service-Oriented Software Engineering (SOSE) to yield these benefits and construct Service-Oriented Software Product Lines (SOSPLs). We propose the Configurable Process Models as the realization of SOSPLs, where services are the building blocks for the implementation of software features, which provide support for variation among members of a product line configured based on stakeholders' requirements.Our proposed approach provides scalable and efficient automated decision-making support in the course of configuration helping to create tailored software services according to stakeholders’ preferences.The key contributions of this thesis are: (i) a systematic analysis of the state-of-the-art research; (ii) a methodology to support variability modeling and management for the development of an SOSPL; (iii) a quality model and evaluation method; (iv) a framework supporting automatic quality-aware process configuration; and (v) an empirical evaluation of performance and scalability of approach.