Abstract. In an environment of constant change, driven by competition and innovation, a service can rarely remain stable -especially when it depends on other services to fulfill its functionality. However, uncontrolled changes can easily break the existing relationships between a service and its environment (its customers and providers). In this paper we present an approach that allows for the controlled evolution of a service by leveraging the loosely-coupled nature of the SOA paradigm. More specifically, we formalize the notion of contracts between interacting services that enable their independent evolution and we investigate under which criteria can changes to a contract-bound service, or even to the contract itself, be transparent to the environment of the service.
An approach for the controlled evolution of Web service contracts is discussed in REF , but without reference to how such an evolution impacts the monitoring of the service execution.
Evolving Services from a Contractual Perspective ⋆
CAiSE
Computer Science Business