Engineering Service Engagements via Commitments

A service engagement describes how two or more independent parties interact with each other. Traditional approaches specify these interactions as message sequence charts (MSCs), hiding underlying business relationships and, consequently, complicating modification. Comma is a commitment-based approach that produces a business model drawn from an extensible pattern library and yields flexible MSCs. An empirical study shows that models produced via Comma yield superior flexibility, are comprehensible to others, and take less time and effort to produce. The Web extra presents the claims regarding Comma's effectiveness as a set of alternative hypotheses, as well as the complete list of MSCs developed via both traditional and Comma approaches.