Many organizations are introducing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as part of their business transformation projects to take advantage of the proposed benefits associated with using SOA. However, in many cases organizations don't necessarily know on which projects introducing SOA would be of value and show real benefits to the organization. In this paper we outline a method and pilot metrics framework (PMF) to help organization's select from a set of candidate projects those which would be most suitable for piloting SOA. The PMF is used as part of a method based on identifying a set of benefit and risk criteria, investigating each of the candidate projects, mapping them to the criteria and then selecting the most suitable project(s). The paper outlines a case study where the PMF was applied in a large government organization to help them select pilot projects and develop an overall strategy for introducing SOA into their organization.

The aims of the PARSE methodology are described, and the process graph design notation is summarised. Process graphs are a new graphical notation for describing systems comprising a collection of parallel processes in a language- and architecture-independent fashion. Further, process graph designs can be mechanically transformed into Petri nets to give a more detailed, executable design specification. Some simple process graphs and their corresponding Petri nets are described in order to demonstrate this transformation process. A more extensive example then illustrates the initial stages of the design process in practice.>

The problems of constructing parallel programs are considered and the aims of the PARSE parallel software engineering methodology are introduced. PARSE is a multi-stage methodology that covers logical and physical design, design verification, and implementation strategy. The first stage in the methodology involves the use of process graphs which provide a language and architecture independent notation for partitioning the problem into processes and specifying the communication relationships between them. This paper gives an outline of the PARSE methodology and describes the process graph notation. The use of the notation is illustrated with an example of a design for a parallel database system.>