Software automates a wide variety of business processes in modern enterprises. Changes made to software are, in effect, changes made to the business processes themselves that govern and automate the internal and external operations of an organization.Without a proper disciplined approach to change management, enterprises lack a full understanding of how software running in production can help them automate their business processes. This includes management of changes to software in development, changes to software in production, and changes to associated artifacts like requirements, models, and test cases. It also includes management of both individual changes and the coordination of dependent changes.
According to ITIL v3, which is the most widely adopted approach for IT Service Management, the purpose of Change Management is to ensure that standardized methods are used for the efficient and prompt handling and recording of all changes so that the overall impact of software changes and business risk is minimized. Change Management is all about ensuring that software changes are recorded, evaluated, authorized, prioritized, planned, tested, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled manner.
Change Management for Semantic Web Services provides a thorough analysis of change management in the lifecycle of services for databases and workflows, including changes that occur at the individual service level or at the aggregate composed service level. This book describes taxonomy of changes that are expected in semantic service oriented environments. The process of change management consists of detecting, propagating, and reacting to changes.
Change Management for Semantic Web Services is one of the first books that discuss the development of a theoretical foundation for managing changes in atomic and long-term composed services. This book also proposes a formal model and a change language to provide sufficient semantics for change management; it devises an automatic process to react to, verify, and optimize changes. Case studies and examples are presented in the last section of this book.
