A Survey of Service Identification Strategies

In service engineering, service identification plays a critical role as it lays the foundation for the later phases. Many existing research focus on creating holistic service oriented engineering process, generating SOA methodologies and frameworks, as well as proposing new service identification methods. Unfortunately, most methods deal with certain business cases and cannot provide universal guidance on service identification. While a few researchers have done surveys on various identification methods, they focus on describing the methods themselves, and the analysis is isolated from either the engineering process or the goals of SOA endeavor. In this paper we present a comprehensive understanding on service identification with software and service engineering process in consideration. We try to answer questions concerning about obtaining a generic service identification method. By examining recent research works we find some shared high-value activities among various methods, which works as a start point to solve the questions we presented. Detailed discussions are studied on these high-value activities. How to apply some frequent used activities under different environments are also covered.