A Service-Oriented Product Lines Implementation
Approach

Problem Statement

As stated in the Introduction, both SPL and SOA can provide several benefits for the software development. Nevertheless, little effort has been made in order to combine these concepts at the implementation level. Current research have proposed approaches, which present the relationship between SPL and SOA concepts. In particular, these work focus on solutions for variability implementation in service-oriented product lines. Nevertheless, they focus on services as core assets in SPL in which the services handle varabilities, and they adress the relationship between SOA and SPL from a conceptual level but to not go into details about the implementation. In this way we have identified some issues that need to be addressed in the service-oriented product lines development. For example:

• The need of practical scenarios recommending specific variability mechanisms according to SOA quality attributes, granularity decisions, modularity and Separation of Concerns (SoC) principles.

• Consider technological concerns, such as the maintenance of the reusable core services through a transparent life cycle mechanism.

• Besides the binding time to decide which possible services will be excluded and included, it must be possible to switch between two or more features, or remove an optional feature without too much effort using a technology combined with variability mechanisms.