Elisabetta Di Nitto

Service compositions are created by exploiting existing component services that are, in general, out of the control of the composition developer. The challenge nowadays is to make such compositions able to dynamically reconfigure themselves in order to address the cases when the component services do not behave as expected and when the execution context changes. We argue that the problem has to be tackled at two levels: on the one side, the runtime platform should be flexible enough to support the selection of alternative services, the negotiation of their service level agreements, and the partial replanning of a composition. On the other side, the language used to develop the composition should support the designer in defining the constraints and conditions that regulate selection, negotiation, and replanning actions at runtime. In this paper we present the SCENE platform that partially addresses the above issues by offering a language for composition design that extends the standard BPEL language with rules used to guide the execution of binding and re-binding self-reconfiguration operations.

This paper presents a report of the International Workshop on Service Oriented Software Engineering colocated with ICSE2006. In particular, we shortly present the papers that have been accepted for publication in the workshop proceedings, the keynote speech, and the discussion topics that have emerged during the workshop.

Software engineering practitioners and researchers continue to face huge challenges in the development, maintenance, and use of software systems. This has been even more prominent with the new paradigm of service oriented computing in which service integrators, developers, and providers need to create methods, tools, and techniques to support cost-effective development and use of dependable services and service oriented applications.

Software engineering practitioners and researchers continue to face huge challenges in the development, maintenance, and use of software systems. This has been even more prominent with the new paradigm of service oriented computing in which service integrators, developers, and providers need to create methods, tools, and techniques to support cost-effective development and use of dependable services and service oriented applications.

Traditional software development is based on the closed-world assumption that the boundary between system and environment is known and unchanging. However, this assumption no longer works within today's unpredictable open-world settings, especially in ubiquitous and pervasive computing settings, which demand techniques that let software react to changes by self-organizing its structure and self-adapting its behavior. The more we move toward dynamic and heterogeneous systems, and the more we stress their self-healing and self-adapting capabilities, the more we need new approaches to develop these applications and new ways to structure and program them. Programming open systems requires new programming language features. Two features that bear investigation are introspection mechanisms to get runtime information about newly encountered services and reflective mechanisms to adapt client applications dynamically. Some existing standards, industrial products, and research prototypes that support, to a certain extent, the open-world assumptions are service-oriented technologies, publish/subscribe middleware systems, grid infrastructures, autonomic frameworks

Software development is a cooperative activity that relies heavily on the quality and effectiveness of the communication channels established within the development team and with the end-user. Process-centered software engineering environments (PSEEs) support the definition and the execution of various phases of the software process. This is achieved by explicitly defining cooperation procedures, and by supporting synchronization and data sharing among its users. PSEE and CSCW technologies have been developed rather independently from each other, leading to a large amount of research results, tools and environments, and practical experiences. We have reached a stage in technology development where it is necessary to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the research efforts carried out so far. Moreover, it is important to understand how to integrate and exploit the results of these different efforts. The goal of the paper is to understand which kind of basic functionalities PSEEs can and should offer, and how these environments can be integrated with other tools to effectively support cooperation in software development. In particular, the paper introduces a process model we have built to support a cooperative activity related to anomaly management in an industrial software factory. The core of the paper presents and discusses the experiences and results that we have derived from this modeling activity, and how they related to the general problem of supporting cooperation in software development. The project was carried out using the SPADE (Software Process Analysis, Design and Enactment) PSEE and the ImagineDesk CSCW toolkit

In this paper we present a runtime platform and a language supporting infomediaries (information intermediaries) in tailoring information extracted from the web to satisfy end user requirements. The language is based on a XML query language and adapts it to the case where information is obtained by aggregating parts distributed over multiple sites. The platform is based on mobile agents and acts as an intermediary between users and information providers.

Future software systems will operate in a highly dynamic world. Systems will need to operate correctly despite of unespected changes in factors such as environmental conditions, user requirements, technology, legal regulations, and market opportunities. They will have to operate in a constantly evolving environment that includes people, content, electronic devices, and legacy systems. They will thus need the ability to continuously adapt themselves in an automated manner to react to those changes. To realize dynamic, self-adaptive systems, the service concept has emerged as a suitable abstraction mechanism. Together with the concept of the service-oriented architecture (SOA), this led to the development of technologies, standards, and methods to build service-based applications by flexibly aggregating individual services. This article discusses how those concepts came to be by taking two complementary viewpoints. On the one hand, it evaluates the progress in software technologies and methodologies that led to the service concept and SOA. On the other hand, it discusses how the evolution of the requirements, and in particular business goals, influenced the progress towards highly dynamic self-adaptive systems. Finally, based on a discussion of the current state of the art, this article points out the possible future evolution of the field.

Abstract A fundamental problem in software processes is how the intrinsic rigidity of a predefined (formal) model can be reconciled with the need for flexibility, change, and evolution. We therefore distinguish between software processes, as specified in a process ...