From public views to private views: correctness-by-design for services

Service orientation is a means for integrating across diverse systems. Each resource, whether an application, system, or trading partner, can be accessed as a service. The resulting architecture, often referred to as SOA, has been an important enabler for interorganizational processes. Apart from technological issues that need to be addressed, it is important that all parties involved in such processes agree on the "rules of engagement". Therefore, we propose to use a contract that specifies the composition of the public views of all participating parties. Each party may then implement its part of the contract such that the implementation (i.e., the private view) accords with the contract. In this paper, we define a suitable notion of accordance inspired by the asynchronous nature of services. Moreover, we present several transformation rules for incrementally building a private view such that accordance with the contract is guaranteed by construction. These rules include adding internal tasks as well as the reordering of messages and are therefore much more powerful than existing correctness-preserving transformation rules.