Feature Based Variability for Service Oriented Architectures

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as a paradigm for distributed computing that promotes flexible deployment and reuse. A software product line (SPL) is a family of software systems that have some common functionality and some variable functionality. During application derivation, the common functionality is reused and a selection is made among the variable functionality. The challenge in SPL is to manage variability among the SPL members - feature modeling is frequently used for this purpose. SOA systems currently lack a systematic approach for managing variability in service requirements. The approach described in this paper addresses this problem by applying SPL concepts to model SOA systems as service families. In this paper, we describe how to model variability in the architectural views of a multiple-view SOA variability model. The approach integrates feature modeling with service views using UML and SoaML, the newly released SOA standard. Such a framework facilitates variability modeling of service family architectures in a systematic and platform independent way.