Maintenance Research in SOA - Towards a Standard Case Study

Maintenance research in the context of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is currently lacking a suitable standard case study that can be used by scientists in order to develop and assess their research ideas, and for comparison, and benchmarking purposes. It is also well established in different fields that having such a standard case study system brings many benefits, in that it helps determine which approaches work best for specific problems. For this reason, we decided to build upon an existing open-source system and make it available for other researchers to use. This system, Spicy Stonehenge, provides many advantages for carrying out maintenance research: it is complex, extensible and, most importantly, openly available for anyone to use and build upon. With this paper, we introduce Spicy Stonehenge as the standard case study SOA system, and we also present our research vision in the field of maintenance, reengineering, evolution and testing of SOA systems, and how these goals fit together with Spicy Stonehenge.