Service Oriented Design, a Key Competency for SOA Success

Professor Gregor Engels of Capgemini sd&m AG and University of Paderborn, presented an overview of Quasar Enterprise, a concrete method for defining services and SOA based solutions, at the December 2008 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Santa Clara, CA.

Quasar Enterprise, based on Capgemini’s Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF), consists of five main steps, analysis of business architecture, definition of an ideal application landscape, evolution planning, integration of components in the application landscape and selection of integration platforms. Each main step is comprised of several methodical building blocks; every building block has concrete rules, patterns and reference architectures derived from real-world best practices.

During his presentation, Professor Engels focused on the business architecture and ideal application landscape steps. Using a fictional travel company example, he walked through the methodical building blocks to derive business services from business goals and then transition to software realization, including application and information services, domains, components, operations, interfaces and degrees of coupling.

Throughout his presentation, Professor Engels took questions from attendees on applying the method, including the role of business personnel in service identification, the iterative nature of Quasar, differences between functional decomposition and object-oriented design techniques, and managing business change across an evolving application landscape.

Presentation Abstract:
Promised benefits of service-oriented architectures, like easy adaptation to changing business requirements, heavily depend on the right design of services. Thus, identifying business services and subsequently realizing them as IT services is a key competency for SOA success.

The talk presents Quasar Enterprise, a concrete method for designing services. It consists of a set of methodical guidelines, concrete rules, and patterns, which have been derived from best practices made in numerous industrial SOA projects over the last ten years.

Quasar Enterprise is explained as a roadmap within an enterprise architecture framework. Main steps are the identification of business goals, business services, and application services. They are grouped within thematic domains, and realized by application landscape components.

 

About the Speaker:

Professor Gregor Engels, Capgemini sd&m AG

From 1991 - 1997, Gregor Engels was professor of Software Engineering and Information Systems at the University of Leiden.  As of 1997, he was Professor of Information Systems at the University of Paderbord investigating research topics of MDA, UML, DSL, SOA, OSS, SPL, and SQA.  Since 2005, Professor Engels has been Chairman of the Board of Directors, s-lab (Software Quality Lab) at PPP-institute, University of Paderbord, Industrial Partners. Professor Engels is also the Scientific Director of Capegmini sd&m Research and member of the founding board of the Informatics Europe.

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