Business process aware identification of reusable software components

Enterprises need to follow the rapid evolution of their business processes and promptly adapt the existing software systems. A preliminary requirement is that the software components are available, working and interoperable. A widely diffused solution is moving the adopted software solution toward an evolving architecture, such as the services-based one. The objective of this paper is to propose an approach for supporting the identification of reusable components in software systems by analyzing the business process using them. The proposed solution is based on the idea that a Service Oriented Architecture can be obtained by using a wide range of existing pieces of code. Such code components can be extracted from the existing software systems by identifying those ones supporting the business activities. Then, the paper proposes an approach for identifying the software components supporting a business process activity and candidate them for implementing a service. With this purpose, the recovery of the links existing between the business process model and the supporting software systems is exploited. An impact analysis activity is also performed starting from the initial traced components.