Discovering Web Services to Improve Requirements Decomposition

As a result of recent trends in enhancing Service-Oriented Requirement Engineering (SORE) activities, a number of requirement specification methods have been proposed for fitting the reuse infrastructure in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The availability of different Requirement Engineering methods offers developers a range of options to choose from. However, most of existing research effort uses traditional Requirement Engineering methods in service-based application developments. During requirements specification, a reusable infrastructure of available web services is not considered at all. The risk is that atomic requirements do not always fit reusable services. As a result, the service composition is time-consuming and needs costly adaption. This paper therefore proposes a novel method by introducing service discovery in the early Requirement Engineering stages so as to guide the requirement decomposition process. Although several researchers have already recommended to involve service discovery in SORE, they do not focus on how to guide requirement decomposition. Our approach is implemented on top of the widely used goal-oriented approach. To this end, we leverage a semantic service discovery method as a means to act as a guide and sentinel in requirement elaboration. We demonstrate the requirement decomposition process by implementing a case study from the Business Traveling domain.