Managing SOA System Variation through Business Process Lines and Process Oriented Development

Software Product Lines (SPL) and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) are two emerging approaches to the software development currently receiving great attention both in research and in practice. Our work suggests an approach to transfer the main peculiarities of the SPL (i.e. asset reuse and variation mechanisms) to the SOA systems development, in order to realize a SOA systems line. In this way we provide a method to easily adapt a SOA application to different customer needs in changeable environments. All this is realized using the Business Process Lines (BPL) concept together with the Process Oriented Development (POD) paradigm. A BPL realizes process models suitable to different customers or market segments needs. The POD paradigm allows to transform a process model into a SOA system. Finally we show an application of our proposal in a research project that involve several industrial and academic organization. In the project a set of BPL is realized and implemented using the MIT process