Service engineering versus software engineering

Abstract

The proposed marriage of service engineering and software engineering is expected to produce offspring that will do justice to both professions. Specifically, it is believed that the market in telecommunication services is better served by those in the software business and that telecommunication engineers can focus on network provisioning. The socalled service creation environment (SCE) is expected to play the role of catalyst in this brave new world.

Much has already been written on the subject. But experience has shown that much still needs to be written. For, even though there are commercially available, though proprietary, SCEs, the question: What is an SCE?, is still being asked.

In this paper, foundational issues are addressed. The nature of an SCE is examined specifically to exhibit the peculiar inherent characteristics of service engineering and the necessary conclusion is reached that the service/software union is wholly determined by the practice of formal methods, counterbalanced and complemented by certification in a service validation centre, of which a testing environment shall be a key component.

The results reported in this paper have arisen from work partially funded by the RACE Project Ref: 2017, Service Creation in an Object-oriented Reuse Environment (SCORE). The opinions expressed are those of the authors.