The Service Responsibility and Interaction Design Method: Using an Agile Approach for Web Service Design

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are increasingly deployed to achieve distributed systems that are modular, flexible and extensible. Designing for a SOA can be difficult, however. There are issues involving the granularity of the cooperating services, and there are no currently accepted conventions for describing a service or its interactions at an abstract level. This paper presents the Service Responsibility and Interaction Design Method (SRI-DM), an agile approach for engineering a Web Service design, based on capturing a scenario as a use-case, factoring this into a set of Service Responsibility and Collaboration Cards, and constructing a Sequence diagram illustrating their interactions in fulfilling the scenario. The paper presents the notation for each step and describes with the aid of an example how this process is used to create a service design within the domain of e-assessment.