Issues for service engineering

Any architecture and infrastructure will implicitly embody certain concepts of the system life-cycle, of integration and of management that will be reproduced in any service that is developed on, or uses, them. Furthermore, the implicit assumptions in the architecture and the infrastructure might conflict. This is an architectural issue that is now recognised in the distributed system community, and means that the path from architecture via infrastructure to the creation of new telecommunications services is not straightforward and free from problems. In this paper we reconnoitre this path and identify the main problems that might be encountered on it. There is useful experience to be gained from studying the relations between architecture, infrastructure and application life cycle that have been recognised in the software engineering and open distributed processing communities and applying the lessons to telecommunications architectures and infrastructures and the service creation applications built using them.<>