Abstract The phenomenon of crossover cooperation and convergence among services has gained increasing attention in the modern service industry. Service boundaries have been expansively stretched into other domains rather than limited to their original domains to achieve value creation, fostering the emergence of crossover services. Consequently, a complex service ecosystem takes shape. However, there is a lack of the convergence‐evolution mechanism of crossover services for the adaptive transformation of service providers' businesses in this context. To address this problem, this paper proposes population‐based and community‐based convergence‐evolution patterns from the ecological perspective. Based on the analysis of these evolution patterns and the driven force of service evolution, we propose an ecology‐oriented evolution analysis method. Furthermore, we devise an automated tool to support the evolution design of crossover service ecosystems. Case studies and evaluation experiments show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed method and the corresponding tool.

Abstract Crossover services involve deep convergence of services in different domains. Requirements analysis of crossover services often requires the collaboration of engineers in different domains and various organizations. The industry has a demand for sophisticated requirements engineering (RE) methods to address challenges brought by crossover and convergence. However, many methods proposed by researchers have not been widely used in the industry, and the reason is that these methods provide technological solutions to the problems and challenges that may not be considered accurate or even real by practitioners in the crossover services industry. A great effort is needed to explore what needs, expectations, and constraints that RE approaches must satisfy and promote the adoption of novel RE approaches in the crossover services industry. The authors have conducted an industrial study to gain an in‐depth understanding of practitioners' needs concerning RE research and method development. The study involved qualitative interviews as well as questionnaires to collect data. The objective of this study is to investigate issues, challenges, and practices of crossover services RE from practitioners' perspectives and to reveal potential guidelines for researchers and tools developers. Findings from five aspects of RE methods are reported and some research directions for future crossover services RE research are provided.

With the increasingly complex requirements of users in modern society, it is difficult to meet the complex goals of users by services from a single domain, and thus crossover service convergence, which aims to provide deep service integration and innovation across boundaries of industries, organizations, and value chains becomes an urgent need. Goal convergence is the first step to guide the process of crossover service convergence. However, there is currently no systematic theory and method to address this problem. In this paper, we propose a method to support goal convergence of crossover services. Firstly, two goal models from different domains are converged according to new user requirements. We then detect inconsistencies of goal models and resolve potential conflicts. We have developed a goal model convergence tool to help requirements analysts perform goal convergence in a visualized way. A case study is presented to show the feasibility of the proposed method.