Searching and Finding Concepts in Service-Oriented Enterprise Software

Error correction during application maintenance is a difficult activity. Finding a source code that implements certain real-world concepts is an essential part of maintenance and is called concept location. The research community has mainly addressed concept location in legacy systems. Nevertheless, the difficulty of concept location in service-oriented software systems is as yet unknown, but thought to be seriously underestimated. This paper discusses characteristics of service-oriented enterprise software systems that complicate or support concept location. The conclusions are based on experiments with two industrial service-oriented enterprise resource planning systems.