Practice: Service Identification
This practice describes how to discover and define candidate services for possible inclusion into an organization's service oriented execution architecture. Candidate services are discovered using six complementary techniques, to maximize the probability that all relevant candidate services have been identified.
Purpose

The Service Identification practice discovers, describes, and classifies a collection of candidate services that, when specified and realized, will satisfy targeted requirements of the business. 

This practice:

  • Reduces the time-to-value for SOA projects.  Performing the practice's techniques increases the chance that one pass through Service Identification will be enough to identify all the services that are necessary to realize the requirements that are being considered. 
  • Improves the quality of business results by producing a set of candidate services that are provably business-aligned. 
  • Improves audit results by establishing traceability from business-relevant precursors to candidate services.
How to read this practice

To understand this practice, begin by reading the key concepts:

You will also need to understand the Object Management Group's SoaML notation for describing service-oriented systems.  Read SoaML and the SoaML-related concepts and guidances that article references.  It will be useful to download the SoaML Specification for detailed reference.

Once you understand the above concepts and have a basic familiarity with SoaML, then review the tasks and guidances of the practice. 

As you work through the tasks and guidance, examine the SoaML sample model to see how the elements created during the tasks might be integrated into a service model.  Refer to the Service Model Structure guidelines to stay on track with respect to organizing your service model.

For step-by-step instructions on how to adopt this practice, see How to Adopt the Service Identification Practice.

Additional Information

Tool Mentor: Build a SoaML Service Model Using the SoaML Template is the entry point into a family of tool mentors that collectively describe how to build a SoaML-based service model using IBM® Rational® Software Architect.  This tool mentor provides an overview description of a process for using the tool to create the model.  It includes callouts to several other tool mentors that accelerate Service Identification efforts.

Relationships