A case study on community-enabled SOA application development

Abstract

The idea to leverage large numbers of the open community resources is straightforward to cater the expectation on reducing the development cost. Knowledge protection and quality assurance in this process are critical challenges for the overall success of such kind of software outsourcing. It is pivotal to provide methods and technologies to ensure all the goals of low cost, no knowledge loss as well as high quality while outsourcing development works to open communities. Call-For-Implementation development method put forward in this paper intends to distribute implementation tasks to the developers of open communities through partitioning a holistic design into pieces of work segments based on some knowledge protection policies. Although CFI method can be widely used for any types of applications, SOA applications are regarded exactly suitable for this method since the components of SOA applications are designed to be loosely coupled. In this paper, we present our study on conducting the CFI method on a real SOA application. Some metrics are defined for validating the hypotheses of the CFI method, including lower cost, knowledge protection, and quality assurance. Measurement result analysis of this case is presented and findings acquired are also reported. © 2007 IEEE.