SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis

Chapter 22. STRUCTURAL CONTRACTION ANALYSIS PROCESS AND MODELING PATTERNS

The structural contraction process introduces best practices and modeling patterns that can assist practitioners in reducing the scope of a distributed service environment and limit an architecture expansion. This process is affiliated with efforts to narrow the spectrum of business offerings, decrease service deployments, and reduce the number of consuming parties across an organization and even beyond. Business and technological concerns call for structural reduction of service deployments, integration, and configuration because of an immeasurable number of imperatives and requirements.

Among the business reasons are reduction of commerce activities, loss of market share, alteration to business model, and change in strategies. From a technological point of view, structural contraction is often attributed to reduction of architecture complexity, improvement of an integrated service environment, and upgrading outdated technologies. Moreover, consolidation of software assets and reconciliation of service deployments are also vital to reduction of expenditure by streamlining the organizational architecture.

To fulfill these enormous challenges, a systematic method should be used to roll back an expanded business and technological landscape and alleviate risks of the structural contraction process. Removing parts of an organizational architecture or discontinuing business offerings to consumers clearly can introduce ...