Taming unbounded variability in service engineering

Abstract

Service Engineering has appeared as a paradigm where businesses can easily collaborate and take advantage of services provided by other organizations or third-party entities for efficient delivery of software-solutions. Although the open-ended landscape of service engineering provides high degrees of flexibility, it also leads to extreme diversity in terms of service development environments, service configuration mechanisms, etc. The number of service variants that arise from such diversity can increase tremendously and potentially can be unbounded. In this paper, we highlight the challenges arising from unbounded variability and present a vision of how it may be tamed without compromising the flexibility afforded by the open-ended nature of service engineering. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.