Leveraging use cases in developing service-oriented systems

Service-oriented systems are systems that combine services that are dispersed over the Internet. System development is normally done by defining a business process or workflow which specifies which services are to be invoked in what order. The specification of the workflow can be done in a top down manner, i.e., the developer first develops an initial specification (workflow), searches for Web services, and then refines the workflow so that the Web services can be invoked. In this paper, we propose supporting the development of the workflow (specifically BPEL document) by suggesting previous development results that could be reused. We focus on requirements (specifically use cases) and correlate use case steps with BPEL activities. This information is stored in a repository. When developing a new service-oriented system, the developer first describes a new use case. This is used to search for similar use cases and their corresponding BPEL documents. The developer uses the information to define the new service-oriented system.