A Business-Goal-Service-Capability Graph for the Alignment of Requirements and Services

The increasing popularity of service-oriented architectures (SOA) raises a number of questions on how to operationalize this new software development paradigm. One important aspect is the one of service granularity, which refers to the scope of functionality covered by one single service. In this paper, we present a graph-based method that helps determine the appropriate granularity of software services in order to match them with software requirements. This procedure becomes important during design- and run-time evaluation of services when determining the suitability of services to support business goals and to implement requirements. The presented Business-Goal-Service-Capability graph (BGSC graph) follows a refinement of requirements and service capabilities until a common granularity level has been reached.