Public administrations are providing citizens with online services. Organizations that have implemented governance based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), with a certain degree of maturity, must incorporate software development methodologies that enhance working with services in the early stages of Web development that means, during Requirements and Analysis phases. The use of Model-driven Web Engineering paradigm (MDWE) in Web engineering appears to have yielded very good results. We will focus on NDT proposal (Navigational Development Techniques), incorporating activities in order to complete the SOA Target Meta-Model. These activities integrate the development lifecycle into SOA Governance Policies and SOA Services lifecycle. This will create a natural and automatic use of SOA Services at public administrations in the early stages of Web development.
One of the key elements in the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Target
MetaModel at public organizations capable of operating under the SOA paradigm [
As the government must provide citizens with public services by means of
telematics processes [
We have chosen the NDT approach (Navigational Development Techniques) [
In the present study we have identified three key challenges that will conform de core of the problem: • The Services formal description. It is necessary to be discovered and used early at the requirements phase of new applications. We need a formal description of the functionality of each service. • A formal high-level description of the new Web Application requirements is demanded. We can represent the requirements at the initial phase of the development through a meta-model as close as possible to natural language, using metadata, phrases or keywords, among other items. • We would need an Information Retrieval System that can have the capability to index the Service Portfolio, accept queries given by the high-level requirements and show the services that agree, in a certain degree of similarity, with those requirements.
This approach fills in the existing gap in the Web Applications development with an intensive use of Services to allow running the work in Services-based environments using MDWE paradigms.
Hence, the main target audiences of this research are SOA-based organizations, particularly public administrations that offer their services through Web applications, as owners of such Services. They are empowered to make changes on them (legislatively and operationally). 2
The implementation of SOA is a complex technological, organizational and business undertaking. It requires being aware of the process theory and knowing it properly, as well as a deep understanding of processes at the organization.
As [
NDT [
NDT supports all phases of the software life cycle: the Feasibility Study Phase, the Requirements Phase, the Analysis Phase, the Design Phase, the Implementation Phase, the Testing Phase, and finally, the Maintenance Phase. All concepts in every phase of NDT are meta-modelled and formally related to other concepts by means of associations and/or OCL constraints.
NDT proposes a set of QVT (Query/View/Transformation) transformations that enables deriving one phase results from the previous one. These transformations are identified by the stereotype «QVTTransformation». The transition from the Requirements Phase to the Analysis models is standardized and automated. It focused on QVT transformations, which translate the concepts of requirements metamodels into the first versions of the analysis models. These models are known in NDT as basic models of analysis. For example, the Basic Navigation Model of analysis is obtained from the Interaction Requirements, some of the requirements defined in NDT, which in turn, describe how user roles can navigate through the system. IRs also describes future access permissions of these roles. Thereafter, the team of analysts can transform these basic models to enrich and complete the final model of analysis. As soon as these transformations are carried out systematically, NDT allows analysts to perform then in order to enrich and complete this basic model. These transformations are represented through the stereotype «NDTSupport». 2.2
MDWE and SOA
We have found many research papers focused on the relationship between SOA and
Web Engineering [
In short, it will be necessary a MDWE paradigm, ready to be part of services from the early stages of development. 3
The proposed solution to integrate MDWE with SOA in terms of the exposed problem intends to add several activities to NDT lifecycle that incorporates the connection with SOA Services Lifecycle.
These activities join requirements with services to develop Web applications by means of the organization services, which can be stored in a repository that shows the contract of the services in UML notation and BPMN business logic. This way, the analyst could consult the services in the early stages of development and activate SOA Services Policies, such as Create SOA Services, Versioning SOA Services or Using SOA Service.
The main objective of this study is to present the set of required activities for NDT lifecycle that could be integrated with the SOA paradigm throughout the development process. This will give the process a more global vision of the approach to business as well as the component reuse, which is one of the SOA paradigm foundations. The aforementioned activities will be added to NDT development process in relation to the Service Lifecycle. Thus, in the process making conditions it may not only reuse existing services in the organization, but also elicit new services that may be used in future roadmap developments. As a direct consequence, it is necessary that the life cycle could contain activities to: • Model the organization’s business processes. • Relate processes to the functionality of the system that supports this process. • Guarantee traceability to allow direction management, that is, impact analysis and business processes change. • All these activities fall under Requirements Phase. These activities will be added to the current life cycle and are not taken into consideration for those events that are not made under the SOA paradigm. Figure 2 outlines how these activities are integrated into NDT lifecycle (in red).The relevant SOA Governance policies will trigger depending on the Service existence.
A set of actions to incorporate SOA Governance processes are performed in the
proposed activity called "Identifying and Defining SOA Services", which links
services to activities. This fact can be observed in Figure 3 below. Now, we propose
several solutions to "Identifying and Defining SOA Services” into Serviced
Governance in terms of the exposed problems:
• As first solutions, we recommend that a Meta-Model should be used to describe the
Services; the information will be grouped so that it can be part of representative
entities, focused on different views. The entities of this Meta-Model are Service,
Domain, Context, Operations or Service Taxonomy, among others. Each service
has associated Policies Governance.
• The second solution proposed involves the necessity of having a set of high-level
requirements [
Our principal contribution can be tackled from different sides. We expected a
theoretical approach to integrate NDT with SOA Governance in a coherent
methodology that could develop Web applications in SOA-based environments
according to SOA Governance. From a practical point of view, an NDT extension is a
mature MDWE methodology that can incorporate services naturally in the early
stages of development in which the services work. This extension will include
NDTSuite evolution [
It is deemed necessary to work in liaison with Public Administration to show that the work solves the targeted problem and overcomes the existing state-of-the-art. The validation cycle focuses on four principles: plan, do, check and act (known as PDCA).
First, we will define the new activities of this methodology. Second, we will modify NDT-Suite to incorporate all aspects to this work. For this aim we will work within SOA Services in the proposed organizations. Third, we will test this framework in the IWT2 Group context through the existing relation with the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport and other administrations that also work together with this research group.
Finally, we could compare the results obtained from these organizations using the new development framework with the previous results achieved after incorporating that new suggested in this study. Section 4 refers to previous studies that obtained the results and metrics. Those metrics will be used for subsequent comparisons.
This work is currently in its initial phase. It is expected to conclude in the next two years. A PhD dissertation on this topic will be presented in 2016.
This research has been supported by MeGUS, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (TIN2013-46928-C3-3-R), and NDTQ-Framework project (TIC-5789) of Junta de Andalucía, Spain.