Issues and challenges of Requirement Engineering in Service Oriented Software Development

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a shift of paradigm in software development. It can be seen as an evolution of Component Based Software Development (CBSD), with web services used instead of Commercial Off-the-shelf (COTS) software. For the last few years the number of services on the web has increased exponentially. Among available services locating the best service that fulfills the user requirement is a challenging task for researchers. There is still no standard Requirement Engineering (RE) process defined for Service Oriented Software Development (SOSD). The traditional processes and those used for COTS selection cannot be used due to the architectural differences of SOSD with other domains. In this paper we have extracted a list of issues and challenges from literature under considerations by research community for RE process in SOSD. The issues of RE in CBSD are compared with those of SOSD, as CBSD is considered close in nature to SOSD. The results shows that there is a need of standard RE process for SOSD with proper guidance on how to perform different steps with details. © 2010 IEEE.