Locating Components Realizing Services in Existing Systems

Organizations adopting service oriented architecture can derive higher business value only if the functionality provided by existing systems is reused. "Servicising" existing systems (locating and exposing available functionality as a set of service based operations), is an efficient way forward, to the evolution of existing systems to SOA. To facilitate the location of service(s) already implemented in the systems, a helpful step is to locate components that realize the required functionality. In this paper, a static and semi-automatic approach to locating components realizing service is proposed. The approach consists of three steps: retrieval of links between a service and the components in the source code, filtering of links using static structural analysis and finally categorizing them as functional and technical components. The results of the approach applied to two open source systems are presented. The results indicate that the approach is quite effective in identifying the links between the service descriptions and source code components and categorizing them into functional and technical components.