Agile requirements handling in a service-oriented taxonomy of capabilities

Abstract

To get to grips with information systems portfolio development, strategic decisions tend towards service orientation and cloud deployment. Functionality should be presented as services that can be consumed from secure clouds in a range of contexts, and service-oriented architectures should enable one to build and rebuild systems portfolios readily and rapidly. However, there is little practical guidance on how to organize and coordinate the multiple lines of work that developing, or modernizing to, a service-oriented portfolio entails. We outline a method framework that uses the structure of a service-oriented taxonomy of capabilities to organize requirements and development in terms of elaboration and refinement of requirements. The method compiles several best practices and supports independent, but integral, lines of work that can be organized in small-scale projects. We illustrate the framework on three cases that involve computer- and simulation-assisted business processes. We conclude that service-oriented capability taxonomies can be used to structure and discipline requirements handling at all levels, from enterprise strategy to technical systems. We suggest that our framework supports the development of capabilities and services that are persistent in the service-oriented sense relative to each other and to implementation. We suggest further that the framework supports collaborative work by facilitating shared conceptions across lines of work. We emphasize that empirical studies should be conducted to evaluate and refine the framework.