SOA and Software Product Lines Options

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Hello Experts,

I want to get your expert opinion regarding this topic as I brainstorm for my PhD proposal in software engineering.

I believe that there are many similarities between SOA and SPL. In fact several individuals and atleast one organization (http://www.cbdiforum.com/) already talked abut this.

I think that SOA and SPL are similar in many aspects like:

• Both emphasize the reusability at a large scale.
• Both instantiate deployed applications by composing preexisting autonomous components.
• Both create architectures capable of evolution.
• SOA has a natural support for variability through parameterization and composition.

Do you think SOA could benfit from SPL approaches especially in Commonality/Variability Analysis?

Do you think this is a worthwhile research area?

Thanks a lot,

Mohammad Matar
Sr. Software Engineer, LexisNexis
PhD student, George Mason University

[Davide Falessi]

Do you think this is a worthwhile research area?

Absolutely yes for two main non-technical reasons:
1)The high interest on SOA
2)The presence of a related workshop (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/SOAPL/) that, in my experience, always highlights a green field for research.

Cheers,
Davide