Rapid Identification Approach for Reusable SOA Assets Using Component Business Maps

Substantial savings from asset reuse result when the right assets are identified in the very early stages of a client engagement. Unfortunately, advanced identification approaches (known by having high precision and recall, such as behavior-based approaches) cannot be adopted in these early stages, because at these early stages, there is no many details nor much understanding about the client functional requirements. On the other hand, unstructured keyword-based identification approaches are known of having low precision and recall. To overcome this problem, we argue that assets descriptions should have explicit information about the business activities realized by the assets. To be able to capture this information in a machine understandable format, this paper proposes a model for describing reusable assets functional scopes using component business maps (CBMs), in which the asset scope is represented as a hierarchy of CBM elements. Adopting this scope model, the paper proposes a rapid identification approach for reusable assets that retrieves assets based on their CBM projections. We believe the proposed approach provides better precision and recall when compared to unstructured keyword-based approaches.