Investigating the use of native language calls in a multi-channel business process

Abstract

Background
Making system functionality available via multi-channel access (MCA) can be achieved through exposing functions and business processes as software services. When offering MCA to a business process, system performance is an important consideration due to network limitations and verbose messaging in service-oriented technologies.

Aims
The first aim of this study is to investigate the potential impact on system performance and agility that may occur when an underlying business process is exposed for MCA. The second aim is to investigate if reengineering a system as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) improves agility. The work also aims to create an MCA reengineering method to transform systems from single-channel into multi-channel.

Methods
A case study was used, along with an experiment, to compare the performance and agility of native language calls (NLC) and protocol based messaging (PBM) for service messaging in a business process. The case study also investigated if reengineering a system as an SOA improves agility by comparing system and code metrics. A multi-channel access reengineering method (McARM) was created and evaluated.

Results
No significant difference was found between the performance of the PBM and NLC binding technologies. However, NLC bindings were found to be less agile than PBM. Reengineering a system as an SOA was found to improve the agility of a system. A method was created which was used to reengineer a system for MCA.

Conclusions
Based on the results, the recommendation is that NLC should not be used instead of PBM for messaging between the services and business processes in a system reengineered for MCA. Measures should be taken to ensure that the reengineering of a system for MCA does not affect performance. Finally, an SOA can be used to improve system agility.