Task: Business Use Case Analysis (SOA)
This task identifies the design elements of a service-oriented solution in terms of services and partitions and documents the initial specification of those services.
Disciplines: Analysis & Design
Purpose
  • To identify the design elements of a service-oriented solution in terms of services and partitions.
  • To document the initial specification of services.
  • To determine the initial dependencies and the communication between services.
Relationships
RolesPrimary Performer: Additional Performers:
InputsMandatory:
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      Outputs
        Main Description

        This task uses Artifact: Business Use-Case Realization as input and identifies a set of candidate services which are included in the project service portfolio. These candidate services may yet require additional refinement, however the steps included here provide an effective manner in which to produce an initial set of Artifact: Service Specification.

        Steps
        Identify Candidate Services from Business Use Cases

        In the development of more traditional component-based and object-oriented solutions, there tends to be a set of transformations across levels of abstraction and adding levels of detail from Use Cases down to system design. This is especially true when you take a Business Use Case as the starting point, as demonstrated in the Guideline: Going from Business Models to Systems; where the guidance demonstrates how to get from Business Use Cases to System Use Cases, we still have to develop an actual design model from there.

        Fortunately, we can also draw a parallel to the guideline provided for going to system-use cases in defining how a service model can be derived from a Business Use Case Model, as shown below. In general the approach is to create a candidate service for each operation defined on a Artifact: Business Worker in the Artifact: Business Analysis Model. There exists a distinct parallel here to the Task: Business Process Analysis where individual tasks in a process model are identified as candidate services.

        Diagram is described in the textual content.

        This more direct connection between the business-analysis model and the service model allows for not only services that can be seen to support the business needs, but by having less transformations between the expression of business needs and the solution, we can more effectively respond to change in the Business Use Case or Analysis Models. Another important aspect is that as the Business Use Case model also includes the Business Goals that are driving the business, it is now much easier to actually identify the alignment between Services and Goals. For example, it is now possible to list, for any Service Specification, all the Business Goals to which it contributes. For any Business Goal we can list the Services actually deployed in our IT organization that contribute to the goal , by following the connection from service to service specification.

        Refine Candidate Service Specifications

        In some cases the set of operations defined in the business use case realization may more correctly reflect a conversation between parties related to a single service than it does to a set of distinct services; in such a case the operations may be aggregated onto a single service specification (as shown below). The drawback to this approach is that it requires more detailed analysis and understanding of the use case realization, and the role of the workers within it, to identify this as a requirement.

        By conversation we mean that often the actual completion of a service requires multiple interactions between parties; for example, if we examine the service 'Place Order' we might actually find that this is a complex set of interactions including acknowledgements, shipping notices, negations (for example if items are unavailable), as might be shown by the following diagram.


         

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