Change Taxonomy and Service Importance Factor for Change Analysis in Composite Service

Service-based applications which increasingly rely on the distributed platform provided by the Web are subject to frequent changes due to changing business and technological requirements. Change impact analysis is an important activity of management for composite services consisting of services available through a marketplace of providers. This paper presents an approach to analyze component service changes in composite services and to evaluate the change effect levels. We first identify the various change types for composite services. Then, we focus on the analysis of service functional changes based on the proposed concept: service importance factor, which is used to measure change effect level. Determining service importance factor is a multi-criteria decision making problem and the fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique is applied to synthesize individual service importance factors related to a set of user-defined criteria. We have shown by the running example that the proposed change impact analysis approach is useful for subsequent tasks in the service change management processes.