Factors Affecting Reusability in Service Oriented Architecture : An Empirical Investigation in Three Companies

Abstract: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architecture which provides a single topology for business applications. SOA provides architecture for integration of several applications within or outside of organizations by reusing application components and services. Reusability is one of the mostly emphasized principles and benefits of SOA. Code reusing has been a concern for application developers. However, another way of reusability is reusing software components and services in SOA. By reusing services, a service can be used in more than one business process of service application. By considering the significance of reusability in SOA, a number of studies have been performed, to theoretically identify the factors affecting reusability in SOA. However, a research is needed to perform an empirical research to identify a set of factors affecting reusability in real business situation. The empirical study is performed by an investigation in three different companies in Sweden, which have been customers of a system integration company and have implemented SOA projects. The investigation is done by performing 5 semi-structured interviews with correspondences of those companies, to find more factors affecting reusability from their perspective. As a result, a set of factors derived from the empirical study is identified which reflects the ideas of practitioners in business. By performing a qualitative approach and comparing the factors derived from the empirical study to factors derived from literature study, it is concluded that academic factors constitute just around 40 percent of factors found in business, and they are mostly technical factors. The rest of factors are new factors based on experience of practitioners in business. The new factors are mostly business oriented factors, and have emerged since 2008, when earlier works are performed. Due to the recent maturity of SOA in organizations, the factors affecting reusability have changed, especially during the last four years.