Understanding Interoperable Systems: Challenges for the Maintenance of SOA Applications

Software interoperability is a pressing need to allow governments and businesses to function efficiently. The most commonly recommended technology for interoperability is Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) implemented using web services. Several authors have argued that SOA systems may be particularly challenging to maintain, largely due to difficulties in program comprehension. Program comprehension for SOA could be aided by appropriate software tools to provide information to SOA maintainers. However, there is little experience regarding the questions that SOA maintainers will need to ask. This paper describes use of a prototype SOA search tool in an informal requirements elicitation study to gather feedback from practicing programmers about what SOA maintainers will want to know. Several specific information needs were identified, including the need for a compact way of representing data types used in services, and the need for ontology support to help understand the many different elements and attributes in web services descriptions.