Authors:
Jaroslav Král
and
Michal Žemlička
Affiliation:
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Czech Republic
Keyword(s):
Service orientation, usability in SOA systems, user involvement, autonomous service, user-oriented component interface, software confederations, agile development of large systems.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Databases and Information Systems Integration
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Legacy Systems
;
Software Engineering
Abstract:
Usability is of a growing importance. It is crucial for the acceptance of software systems nowadays. Software usability in its classical sense is mainly the property of the user interface of a system. Usable interface should have at least three properties: it must be easily understood and remembered and not too laborious in use. We show that in SOA systems called confederation the first two properties should have the interfaces of constituent application services. It is a precondition for the usability of user system interface. The properties are crucially important for the software engineering aspects of confederations (scalability, modifiability, reuse of existing systems, stability) as well as for their functions, e.g. for business processes (flexibility, on-line modifiability, etc.). We discuss some standardization issues.