Capability Diagnostics of Enterprise Service Architectures Using a Dedicated Software Architecture Reference Model

The SOA Innovation Lab - an innovation network of industry leaders in Germany and Europe - investigates the practical use of vendor platforms in a service-oriented context. For this purpose an original service-oriented ESA-Enterprise-Software-Architecture-Reference-Model, an associated ESA-Architecture-Maturity-Framework and an ESA-Pattern-Language for supporting architecture evaluation and optimization has been researched, leveraging and extending CMMI and TOGAF, as well as other service-oriented state-of-the art frameworks and methods. Current approaches for assessing architecture quality and maturity of service-oriented enterprise software architectures are rarely validated and were intuitively developed, having sparse reference model, metamodel or pattern foundations. This is a real problem because enterprise and software architects should know how advanced architecture quality concepts can successfully be used and how a stable foundation for introducing service-oriented enterprise architectures for adaptive systems looks like. Our idea and contribution is to extend existing enterprise and software architecture reference models and maturity frameworks to accord with a sound metamodel approach. We have developed and are presenting the idea of a pattern language for assessing the architecture quality of adaptable service-oriented enterprise systems. Our approach is based on ESARC -- an Enterprise Software Architecture Reference Model we have developed.