Software Service Evolution: A Requirements Perspective

Software service has to adapt to constant changes of requirements and environment, which would give rise to the concentration on service evolution. Among the many reasons for evolution, requirements are regarded as the major driving factor. However, most current work on service evolution focuses on different kinds of tactics to keep the compatibility between services and client applications, few of them treat requirements in priority. In this paper, we thoroughly survey the state-of-the-art studies on service evolution, including basic concepts, types, challenges and approaches; then analyze service evolution from four dissimilar dimensions, and for each one we identify the open problems and inadequacies. Based on our analysis and discovery, we argue that requirements driven service evolution would become an essential and promising research direction.