Using a personal assistant for exploiting service interfaces

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a proven approach that aims at producing loosely coupled, standard-based, and protocol-independent services. A compliant SOA architecture must provide independents units or services, allowing users to discover, execute and compose them in their applications. In order to follow the rapidly changing and highly competitive market, organizations have to adapt their service interfaces according to their business requirement. Thus, the design is one of the most crucial phases of service lifecycle. From the last years, the software engineering domain has made a great effort providing methods for agile development. Despite these efforts, we lack the necessary tools to use and validate the rich vocabulary presented in user stories and test cases during the service design. We propose a CSCWD approach for the exploitation of independent services using a personal assistant to guide the end user through a natural language dialog. The personal assistant plays the role of a mediator between end-users and the service library. The generated proof-of-concept allows the interaction with services through a personal assistant using restricted requests in natural language. Using our approach, software designers and domain experts can evaluate the expressiveness of their service interfaces and conduct a process improvement, adjusting the vocabulary and granularity of services iteratively.