Service traceability in SOA-based software systems: a traceability network add-in for BPAOntoSOA framework

BPAOntoSOA is a generic framework that generates a service model from a given organisational business process architecture. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) traceability is essentially important to facilitate change management and support reusability of an SOA; it has a wide application in the development and maintenance process. Such a traceability network is not available for BPAOntoSOA framework. This paper introduces an ontology-based traceability network for BPAOntoSOA framework that semantically generates trace links between services and business process architectural elements in both forward and backward directions. The proposed traceability approach was evaluated using the postgraduate faculty information system case study in order to assess the framework behaviour in general. As a continued evaluation effort, a group of parameters have been selected to create an evaluation criterion, which was used to compare the BPAOntoSOA trace solution to one of the most related traceability frameworks, STraS traceability framework.