Impact analysis and change propagation in service-oriented enterprises: A systematic review
Introduction
The complementary relationship between Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) has paved the way for organizations to become more competitive while automating processes and systems across business lines. Services and supporting business processes are inherently dynamic. Therefore, flexibility to accommodate different functional, structural, regulatory and technological changes is considered crucial in business environments.
Change management in service-based environments and Business Process Models is an emerging research area entailing numerous nontrivial issues and problems [77], [81]. Process models are mainly used in the earlier system development stages and are equally clear to both software engineers and the business community. These models are always prone to different kinds of changes, such as new regulatory laws, changes in business policies or strategies, or emerging technologies. Without proper control, such changes to process models may have disruptive effect on the overall system due to structural, functional or qualitative anomalies [72]. Therefore, process flexibility and change are deemed of crucial concern in the Business Process Management (BPM) domain [15]. Adaptive business process management systems [67] and version management of business processes [92] are relevant areas of change management in this regard; however, our focus is specifically on impact analysis and propagation of business process changes. From Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) point of view, services are also subject to constant changes and modifications. Changes can originate from functional requirements, policy constraints, and behavioral attribute alterations, and can lead to exhaustive service redesign and improvement. Without adequate control, such changes can also disrupt overall system functionality and performance [1]. A change in a business process would cause changes in underlying services supported by that business process. Similarly, a change in a service would lead to changes in its supporting business process and other services supported by that business process [79]. Therefore, it is important to estimate the effect of a proposed change on the overall system (CIA) and how that change can be propagated efficiently to transfer its effect with minimum disruption to the system (change propagation).
This study contributes in the following ways:
- (a)
A comprehensive systematic review on change analysis and propagation in service-oriented enterprises.
- (b)
Identifying changes and dependencies across different abstraction layers.
- (c)
Classifying change analysis and propagation techniques in two dimensions.
- (d)
Analyzing and synthesizing existing research works in this domain.
- (e)
Identifying particular areas of research that lack attention from the scientific research community.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the review strategy and process. Section 3 provides detailed discussion and results. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section 4 followed by a list of acronyms in Section 5.
Section snippets
Research method
A systematic literature review (SLR) is aimed at identifying, evaluating and interpreting all available research related to a particular field of interest. An SLR must be accomplished with a rigorous search plan that is fair and unbiased. The search strategy or plan must ensure the completeness of the search for assessment [20]. At the time of this report, there was no systematic study that provided a rigorous review and analysis of most existing research in this domain. Our aim is to fill this
Discussion and results
Change impact analysis (CIA) is performed to analyze and assess the ripple effect of a change in software systems. CIA techniques are used to predict such ripple effects before initiating or implementing a proposed change. They help evaluate how far a planned change can reach, and how other system components will be affected. Significant literary work in this area was presented by Bohner [5], who classified CIA techniques into two main categories: dependency analysis and traceability analysis (
Conclusion
Change management in service-oriented enterprises has emerged as a new research area entailing numerous nontrivial issues and problems. Impact analysis and change propagation activities in service-oriented environments are more complex and challenging than traditional software systems. This study was intended to systematically review available literature on change analysis and propagation in service-based BPM systems. As SOA and BPM are becoming dominant technologies and their natural alliance
Acronyms
To improve the readability, Table 12 enlists acronyms used in this study along with their full forms.
Conflict of interests
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this article.
Acknowledgment
This work is fully funded by Bright Spark Unit (BSP-1632-13), University of Malaya, Malaysia.
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