Evolutionary transition of enterprise applications to service orientation

Enterprise applications serve mission critical business processes. Critical assets involve non-functional aspects:

• User acceptance
• Software aesthetics (maintainability, readability, extensibility)
• Performance prediction

User Acceptance

The user interface is the business card of an enterprise application. This research area focuses on the idea "UI First". User productivity is the outcome of the end-user driven software development. First results show that this approach even boosts the subsequent software development process.

 Software aesthetics (maintainability, readability, extensibility)

 The research will follow an engineering-based approach. Firstly, the current state of existing software systems and the code base must be understood. Secondly, ideas must be elaborated towards a target state. Thirdly, the transition between current state and target state must be planned using best practices. Fourthly, several documents serving different audiences are necessary.

 Modelling techniques play a major role in understanding the current and target state. Transition techniques cover patterns, best industrial practices and an examination of available industrial solutions.

 Performance prediction

 Business applications are often spanning various enterprises. This research area focuses on the performance prediction for composite applications.