Static Support for Understanding SOA Descriptions: Exploring the Requirements

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has emerged as a way of providing flexibility to large scale software systems. However there may be problems in understanding and maintaining software constructed using this new paradigm. This paper summarizes some of the issues that have been discussed and analyzes the requirements for static analysis tools to aid SOA maintainers. It also describes ongoing work on SOAMiner, a text search tool tuned to the analysis of SOA description files such as WSDL's, XSD's, and BPEL's. SOAMiner is currently under development following a spiral model to clarify requirements through repeated evaluations of prototypes.