Service Oriented Requirements Engineering: Practitioner's Perspective

Over a decade ago Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was introduced to provide better alignment between business requirements and IT solutions. During this period a great deal of research interest has emerged from academia and industry alike, to promote this new style of software development. The promise was that SOA based development will improve reusability, agility, platform independence and dynamic discovery, reconfiguration and change management. In spite of all the promises and enhancement in tools and technologies, the service oriented software development continues to face various challenges especially in Requirements Engineering. In this paper we present a qualitative study of Service Oriented Requirements Engineering. Data was collected by conducting interviews with practitioners from IT companies in Sydney, who are experienced in working on SOA based projects. The objective was to explore the issues and challenges faced during requirements analysis in service oriented software development. The results show that Service-Oriented software development has not only inherited existing issues of traditional Requirements Engineering but has also introduced new challenges. The technology has become advanced in SOA but the issues related to the organizational and business aspect of service oriented development need more attention for achieving true benefits of this technology.