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Distributing software processes by software producing organizations (SPOs) is emerging increasingly due to benefits that global software engineering (GSE) brings in terms of cost reduction, leveraging competencies, and market expansion. However, these organizations are facing communication and project control issues that can slow down the overall organization performance. Therefore, SPOs should be able to manage inter-dependencies among the tasks distributed to the globally dispersed teams. We analyze existing works and product software companies’ best practices in coordinating tasks in GSE. This paper specifically focuses on constructing methodological support for task coordination that can be influenced by the situational factors at the companies. The support comprises a framework and a method developed by using a method engineering approach. We introduce the framework that depicts the aspects that should be examined by companies and the method that elaborates the practices to guide companies to coordinate tasks in GSE projects. The validation results show that the framework and the method are accepted by experts regarding completeness and applicability to help SPOs in managing coordination among globally distributed teams.

Current cloud-based service offerings are often provided as one-size-fits-all solutions and give little or no room for customization. This limits the ability for application developers to pick and choose offerings from multiple software, platform, infrastructure service providers and configure them dynamically and in an optimal fashion to address their application requirements. Furthermore, combining different independent cloud-based services necessitates a uniform description format that facilitates their design, customization, and composition. Hence, there is a need to break down the monolithic offerings into loosely-coupled cloud services offered by multiple providers that can be flexibly customized and (re-)composed in different settings. We propose in this paper the Blueprint concept - a uniform abstract description for cloud service offerings that may cross different cloud computing layers, i.e. software, platform and infrastructure. Using the proposed Blueprint Template for engineering cloud service offerings will solve these shortcomings and subsequently lower the barrier to entry for cloud computing.

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions. To build the service model, SOC relies on the service oriented architecture (SOA), which is a way of reorganizing software applications and infrastructure into a set of interacting services. However, the basic SOA does not address overarching concerns such as management, service orchestration, service transaction management and coordination, security, and other concerns that apply to all components in a service architecture. In this paper we introduce an extended service oriented architecture that provides separate tiers for composing and coordinating services and for managing services in an open marketplace by employing grid services.

Earlier in this book, Chapter 8 provided a detailed analysis of service engineering, including a review of service engineering techniques and methodologies. This chapter is closely related to Chapter 8 as shows how such approaches can be used to develop a service, with particular emphasis on the identification of three views (the automation decision view, degree of service automation view and service automation related data view) that structure and ease elicitation and documentation of stakeholders’ concerns. This is carried out through two large case studies to learn the industrial needs in illustrating services deployment and configuration automation. This set of views adds to the more traditional notations like UML, the visual power of attracting the attention of their users to the addressed concerns, and assist them in their work. This is especially crucial in service oriented architecting where service automation is highly demanded.