Group Project: Determining Service Granularity

A useful, functional, reusable service has a well-defined service interface with appropriate granularity. A coarse-grained service provides more functionality and encapsulates more underlying business processes than a fine-grained service. It is common to provide coarse-grained services for application developers to use, while relying on several fine-grained services to implement the coarse-grained service.

To prepare for this Group Project, read the following section from the course text Service-Oriented Architecture: A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology:

Chapter 4, "Services Identification, Analysis, and Design,"

o Section "Candidate Service Analysis"

Individually, write a high-level (nondetailed) description of each of the four services your group identified last week.

Now, share your report with the rest of your group. As a group, do the following:

Select or synthesize the best description for each service.

Determine the appropriate level of granularity for each service.

o Should the service be coarse grained or fine grained? Justify your decision.

o Describe at least one coarse-grained service and one fine-grained service.

Write a 2- to 3-page group report detailing your responses. Your report should conform to the APA style.