Automatically Determining Compatibility of Evolving Services Karin Becker, Andre Lopes, Dejan Milojicic, Jim Pruyne, Sharad Singhal HP Laboratories HPL-2008-49 May 21, 2008* SOA, service, backward compatibility, version A major advantage of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is composition and coordination of loosely coupled services. Because the development lifecycles of services and clients are de-coupled, multiple service versions have to be maintained to continue supporting older clients. Typically versions are managed within the SOA by updating service descriptions using conventions on version numbers and namespaces. In all cases, the compatibility among services description must be evaluated, which can be hard, error-prone and costly if performed manually, particularly for complex descriptions. In this paper, we describe a method to automatically determine when two service descriptions are backward compatible. We then describe a case study to illustrate how we leveraged version compatibility information in a SOA environment and present initial performance overheads of doing so. By automatically exploring compatibility information, a) service developers can assess the impact of proposed changes; b) proper versioning requirements can be put in client implementations guaranteeing that incompatibilities will not occur during run-time; and c) messages exchanged in the SOA can be validated to ensure that only expected messages or compatible ones are exchanged. External Accession Date Only Approved for External Publication Submitted to the IEEE International Conference one Web Services (ICWS), 2008 China © Copyright 2008 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.