Supporting Change Propagation in the Maintenance and Evolution of Service-Oriented Architectures

As Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to be broadly adopted, the maintenance and evolution of service-oriented systems become a growing issue. Maintenance and evolution are inevitable activities since almost all systems that are useful and successful stimulate user-generated requests for change and improvement. A critical issue in the evolution of SOA is change propagation: given a set of primary changes that have been made to the SOA model, what additional secondary changes are needed to maintain consistency across multiple levels of the SOA models. This paper presents how an existing framework can be applied to effectively support change propagation within a SOA model. We also propose to extend this framework with a minimal modification strategy that helps select change options in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of SOA models.