Lecture slides

1. Lecture 1: Introduction to the course
2. Lecture 2: Emergence of the Service Sector; Servitization
3. Lecture 3: Service orientation
4. Lecture 4: Service ecosystems - Concepts and Characteristics
5. Lecture 5: Service-oriented analysis
6. Lecture 6: Service-oriented design I - Systems and Architectures
7. Lecture 7: Service-oriented design II - Services and Service Compositions
8. Lecture 8: Service-oriented development
9. Lecture 9: Service management
10. Lecture 10: Advanced topics and course summary

Good tutorials available in the Internet

1. Modeling business processes with BPMN
2. SoaML tutorial
3. Basic OSGi and OSGi Services (DS)

Assignments

In the reading assignments you should first read the given articles and then write an essay summarizing them. The expected length of an essay is about 1000 words and must be written as a scientific text (i.e. as taught in the scientific writing course). The essay should have a clear structure (i.e. at least an introduction, a middle part, and a conclusion) and the text should advance in a logical manner (a list of bullet points is not accepted as an essay). The essays will be returned by email to the lecturer (Toni.Ruokolainen(at)cs.Helsinki.FI) before the given deadline. Final version will be attached also as part of the course portfolio. The file format for the assignments is pdf.

You can access the articles with computers of the Department of Computer Science and the University of Helsinki. You may also access the articles from your home if you create a VPN connection to the university system: see the instructions.

Reading assignment 1: Value creation in service systems.

Read the following articles:

• Spohrer, Jim et al. "Steps toward a science of service systems." Computer 40.1 (2007): 71-77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2007.33
• Prahalad, Coimbatore K, and Venkat Ramaswamy. "Co-creating unique value with customers." Strategy & Leadership 32.3 (2004): 4-9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10878570410699249

Write an article about value creation in service systems (you may use "Value creation in service systems" as the title of your essay or create your own). Your essay should discuss and answer at least the following questions:

1. What are service systems? How are the related to services?
2. What are the characteristics of value creation in service systems? How does it differentiate from contemporary value creation associated with tangible goods?

Deadline: February 1st.

Reading assignment 2: Service design and development methodology

Read the following article:

• Papazoglou, Michael P., and Willem-Jan Van Den Heuvel. "Service-oriented design and development methodology." International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology 2.4 (2006): 412-442. PDF

Write an article about the service development methodology. Your essay should discuss and answer at least the following questions:

• What kinds of activities are typical for service design and development? In what phases are those activities taken? (You don't have to elaborate on all the activities in the article but you can pick the most fundamental ones)
• What are the main design and development principles discussed in the paper? What do they mean?

Deadline:  February 15th

Modelling assignment I: Service choreography modelling with BPMN

In this exercise you should look at the use cases described below and model a choreography that conforms to, or implements the behaviour by, the use cases. In the resulting choreography you should have (at least) four roles: one representing the traveller, another representing the travel provider (represented as the TravelReservationSystem in TravellerUseCaseDiagram and as actor TravelProvider in TravelManagementUseCaseDiagram), third representing the hotel reservation system and fourth representing the flight reservation system.

Some simplifications with respect to real-world cases have been made in the use case descriptions, for example regarding payments (which should involve some kind of financial service provider). Correspondingly, you are not expected to address every possible exceptional or alternative situation that could happen in the real-world scenarios. It suffices to meet the behaviour described in the use case descriptions, including the exceptional flows. You should be familiar with use case descriptions, if not, there are plenty of information available on the Internet :) In the use case descriptions below, the alternative flows are embedded in the main path, while exceptional flows are isolated as distinct elements; an exceptional flow description numbered 3.1 refers to step 3 in the main path, for example. 

You can use the model created at the tutorial session to get your work going. However, you should note that the tutorial version of the use case is a bit different (simpler) that the one used in here. The Modelio BPMN project created at the tutorial session can be found here: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/thruokol/TravelReservation.zip 
You can import the above Modelio project to you workspace - Modelio has an "Import project.." selection under the "File" menu (make sure you have no projects open, since you can only have one project open at a time). For some reason the above project has one warning - you can neglect it.

Use case descriptions

Tools

Two different tool platforms are utilized during the course for service-oriented modelling and development. They are free open-source tools named Modelio and Eclipse:

• Modelling tool: Modelio
• Service development tool: Eclipse
  • For your convenience, a version appropriate for use at the department machines is here: eclipse-SDK-4.2.1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

Tutorial 1

In this tutorial we are going to model a simple service choreography with BPMN. The resulting choreography describes interactions between a traveller and a travel reservation system. The choreography design is based on a use case description given below.

Use case description:
 

Literature

Relevant literature references will be provided here. References are given in the lecture slides for now.