Towards Application and Evolution of Model-Based Heuristics for Improving SOA Service Design

Good service design is key to acceptance and success for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in an enterprise. Enterprises try to achieve good service design by using guidelines which combine experts´ experience, company policies and best practices. Applying, evolving and maintaining guidelines overburdens service designers and reviewers due to the amount and volume. This results in inefficient, costly and frustrating processes. Without an automated support, guidelines provide only limited value to the design process. We describe how our design environment prototype addresses these problems and introduce automatic guideline checks using heuristics on service models. Our evaluation confirms applicability and advantages of our tool. We present a selection of heuristics which are used in our tool. As the second contribution we describe our plan of how to support evolution and maintenance of guidelines and heuristics.