Change management for service based business processes

In the service oriented computing paradigm, business processes and services are subject to change and variation arising from both the external and internal requirements of organizations from time to time. A service change can affect its internal supporting business process and a change occurred in a business process often has various levels of impact on its supported services. This thesis provides research results on the challenging issue of change management for service-based business processes. -- Different from existing works in the fields of business process change management, this research focuses on the dependencies between services and business processes. In the real world, there are cases when multiple services are supported by a single business process. The changes of a business process and multiple services can affect each other. The dependencies between services and business process make change management complex and challenging. To manage such changes, it is crucial to identify different types of changes associated with services and business processes, analyse change impact patterns, and then decide the effective mechanisms to deal with them. -- In this thesis, a service-oriented business process model is developed for capturing the major characteristics of the required change management in the context described above. Based on the proposed model, the taxonomy is identified for the changes associated with services and business processes. A set of change impact patterns are specified. Each change impact pattern describes a specific type of change effect. With the help of the change taxonomy, the change impact patterns, and the mechanisms for dealing with individual changes, the cascading effect of changes within the service-based business processes can be analysed. As a proof of concept, a prototype has been developed to realize the change management mechanisms presented in this thesis.