This is the web site of the Variation-Oriented Engineering (VOE) project, which investigates research issues regarding enhancing reusable SOA-based software development via variation-oriented approaches.
The project participants are:
Nanjangud C Narendra (Project Lead) (narendra (at) in.ibm.com)
Karthikeyan Ponnalagu (karthikeyan.ponnalagu (at) in.ibm.com)
Dipayan Gangopadhyay (gangopad (at) us.ibm.com)
Biplav Srivastava (sbiplav (at) in.ibm.com)
Synopsis:
Software service organizations typically develop custom solutions from scratch in project engagement. This is not a scalable proposition. Today, driven by the need for enhancing profitability, reuse of assets across customer engagements is a more viable strategy. One highly prevalent asset-based approach in this domain is to build business processes from a portfolio of services using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach. This provides a mechanism for representing assets as a set of business-aligned, loosely-coupled services that can be iteratively composed and re-composed to create loosely coupled composite applications that mirror and support business processes.
Our approach, called Variation Oriented Engineering (VOE) is built on the Variation-oriented Analysis and Design (VOAD) paradigm and utilizes SOA principles to formally model key variation types, including business process variations. The model that is subsequently constructed can then be used to rapidly re-configure or customize business processes for different customer requirements, thereby enhancing reusability.
Our approach has also been broadened to incorporate the automated determination of variants from changed requirements, via a project that we call Morpheus.
In general, we envision VOE to be an overarching framework and philosophy to enhance reuse and improve the productivity of software engineers and architects while developing asset-based solutions using model-driven development approaches.
Publications (please send mail at "narendra (at) in.ibm.com" if you want copies of these papers):
1) N.C. Narendra, K. Ponnalagu, B. Srivastava and G.S. Banavar. Variation-Oriented Engineering (VOE): Enabling Reusability of SOA-based Solutions, SCC 2008
2) R. Ravichandar, N.C. Narendra, K. Ponnalagu and D. Gangopadhyay. Morpheus: Semantics-based Incremental Change Propagation in SOA-based Solutions, SCC 2008