Closing the Business-Application Gap in SOA - Challenges and Solution Directions

Adequately resolving the business-software gap in the context of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) appears to be a non-trivial task, mainly because of the dual essence of the service concept: (i) services are inevitably business-restricted because they operate in real-life environments; (ii) services are also technology-restricted because the software components realizing them have to obey the restrictions of their complex technology-driven environments. Hence, the existence of these two restriction directions makes the (SOA-driven) business-software alignment challenging – here current business-software mapping mechanisms can only play a limited role. With regard to this, the contribution of the current paper is twofold: 1. it analyzes SOA and its actual challenges, from a business-software-alignment perspective, deriving essential SOA application desirable properties; 2. it proposes software services specification directions, particularly concerning the (SOA-driven) business-software mapping. This contribution is expected to be useful in current software development.