Business Process Lines to Develop Service-Oriented Architectures Through the Software Product Lines Paradigm.
Nicola Boffoli, Danilo Caivano, Daniela Castelluccia, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Giuseppe Visaggio · Software Product Lines · 2008
Lately many researchers are focused on differences and similarities between Software Product Lines (SPL) and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). An interesting research topic is how to apply the SPL good practices to the SOA building. So the authors introduce the concept of Business Process Line (BPL) in order to transfer the SPL peculiarities first to the business processes and then to the SOA systems implementing them. A BPL realizes processes able to adapt themselves to different customers or market segments needs. Each process of a BPL can be composed and then transformed in the corresponding SOA system. In this way, all the resultant SOA systems will be suitable to different customer needs as the underlying processes, so that advantages from SPL good practices are gained from SOA architectures. In this paper the authors propose a methodology based on decision tables to represent a BPL and sketch an