Service-Oriented Computing holds great promises to realize the vision of on-demand services available anytime and anywhere. It is still not clear, however, when and how the existing systems will benefit from this new wave. The problem is particularly acute for the software embedded in myriad devices. This work charts a roadmap for migration of legacy software to pervasive service-oriented computing. A key idea is to achieve integration even at the presentation layer, not only at backend layers like application or data. This requires re-inventing the popular mashup technology for the enterprise level. Domain-Specific-Kits, which has been originally introduced within the context of software factory automation, has been reshaped as another enabling technology towards migrating to the service harmonization platform.

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a prominent paradigm for the assembly of a family of products using product line core assets. The modeling of software assets that together form the actual products is critical for achieving the strategic benefits of Software Product Lines (SPLs). We propose a feature-based approach to software asset modeling based on abstractions provided by Domain-Specific Kits (DSKs). This approach involves a software Asset Metamodel (AMM) used to derive Asset Modeling Languages (AMLs) that define reusable software assets in domain-specific terms. The approach also prescribes a roadmap for modeling these software assets in conjunction with the product line reference architecture. Asset capabilities can be modeled using feature diagrams as the external views of the software assets. Internal views can be expressed in terms of Domain-Specific Artifacts (DSAs) with Variability Points (VPs), where the domain-specific artifacts are created using Domain-Specific Kits. This approach produces loosely coupled and highly cohesive software assets that are reusable for multiple product lines. The approach is validated by assessing software asset reuse in two different product lines in the finance domain. We also evaluated the productivity gains in large-scale complex projects, and found that the approach yielded a significant reduction in the total project effort.

This article presents a microservice-based development approach, MSDeveloper (Microservices Developer), employing variability management for product configuration through a low-code development environment. The purpose of this approach is to offer a general-purpose environment for the easier development of families of products for different domains: a domain-oriented development environment is suggested, where domain developers and product developers can utilize the environment as a software ecosystem. Thus, genericity is offered through supporting different domains. A domain is populated with feature and process models and microservices in a layered architecture. Feature models drive the product configuration, which affects the process model and the microservice layer. An experimental study was conducted to validate the applicability of the approach and the usability of the development environment. Students from different courses were assigned system modeling projects where they utilized helper tools supporting the provided methodology. Furthermore, professional software developers were consulted about this recommended domain-oriented development environment. Feedback from student projects and professionals’ remarks are analyzed and discussed.