An EA-approach to Develop SOA Viewpoints

The paradigm of service orientation is heavily used to design complex IT systems able to satisfy the need for an agile business support. Many enterprises have established service-oriented architectures (SOAs) of different size and complexity. However, such SOAs need efficient management and the discipline of enterprise architecture management has only just begun to reflect the shift from application orientation to service orientation. This contribution discusses how enterprise architecture management can react on service orientation by providing a viewpoint-driven approach. We present a methodology able to develop SOA viewpoints by systematically addressing stakeholder concerns, designing an adequate metamodel, identifying data sources and providing visualizations for stakeholders´ analyses. To evaluate the approach, 45 SOA-related concerns were collected, a comprehensive metamodel was designed, and a prototype was implemented able to support typical SOA analyses in an enterprise context.