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Service feature modeling: modeling and participatory ranking of service design alternatives

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Abstract

The design of software-intensive service systems involves and affects numerous stakeholders including software engineers, legal and business experts as well as a potentially large number of consumers. In consequence, the challenge arises to adequately represent the interests of these groups with respect to service design decisions. Specifically, shared service design artifacts and participatory methods for influencing their development in consensus are required, which are not yet state of the art in software service engineering. To this end, we present service feature modeling. Using a modeling notation based on feature-oriented analysis, our approach can represent and interrelate diverse service design concerns and capture their potential combinations as service design alternatives. We further present a method that allows stakeholders to rank service design alternatives based on their preferences. The ranking can support service engineers in selecting viable alternatives for implementation. To exploit this potential, we have implemented a toolkit to enable both modeling and participative ranking of service design alternatives. It has been used to apply service feature modeling in the context of public service design and evaluate the approach in this context.

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Notes

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  4. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.html.

  5. Accessible at: http://paris.atc.gr/cockpit/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. eOrganization Research Group, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Englerstr. 11, 76131 , Karlsruhe, Germany

    Erik Wittern & Christian Zirpins

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  1. Erik Wittern
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  2. Christian Zirpins
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Correspondence to Erik Wittern.

Additional information

Communicated by Prof. Gregor Engels.

This work has been supported by STREP grant 248222 “COCKPIT” within the 7th European Community Framework Programme.

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Wittern, E., Zirpins, C. Service feature modeling: modeling and participatory ranking of service design alternatives. Softw Syst Model 15, 553–578 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-014-0414-4

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