Does Service Discovery Enhance Requirements Specification? A Preliminary Empirical Investigation

Service-centric systems pose new challenges and opportunities for requirements processes and techniques. This paper describes new techniques developed by the EU-funded SeCSE Integrated Project that enable service discovery during early requirements processes and exploit discovered services to enhance requirements specifications, and reports 2 preliminary evaluations of software tools by our industrial partners that implement SeCSE's processes and techniques. The first evaluation investigated the usability and functionality of UCaRE, a web-based tool for specifying requirements prior to discovering services. The second evaluation investigated the utility and usability of UCaRE combined with EDDiE, the service discovery engine, during a requirements discovery workshop. Results from both evaluations inform the design of the second versions of SeCSE's processes, techniques and tools.