Situational method engineering is an approach to dynamically configure method fragments. In doing so, complete methods can be tailored to suit concrete project situations. Identifying such situations and selecting appropriate fragments is crucial for a successful method engineering process. In the field of service identification for service-oriented architectures most existing methods follow a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to acknowledge the broad variety of concrete circumstances that form the organizational context. In this paper, we argue that situational method engineering can be used to tailor service identification methods to particular application contexts. As a first step towards this goal, we analyze two explorative case studies and related literature to derive a basic set of relevant context factors. Moreover, the influence of these context factors on the selection and configuration of method fragments is examined. Adapting service identification methods to concrete project situations will improve their applicability and lead to a better service design.

Although the service-oriented paradigm has been well established in the technical domain for quite some time now, service governance is still considered a research gap. To ensure adequate governance, there is a necessity to manage services as first-class assets throughout the lifecycle. Now that the concept of service-orientation is also increasingly applied on the business level to structure an organisation's capabilities, the problem has become an even bigger challenge. This paper presents a generic business and software service lifecycle and aligns it with the common management layers in organisations. Using service analysis as an example, it moreover illustrates how activities in the service lifecycle may vary on lower levels of granularity depending on the focus on business or software services.

Although the benefits of service orientation are prevalent in literature, a review, analysis, and evaluation of the 30 existing service analysis approaches presented in this paper have shown that a comprehensive approach to the identification and analysis of both business and supporting software services is missing. Based on this evaluation of existing approaches and additional sources, we close this gap by proposing an integrated, consolidated approach to business and software service analysis that combines and extends the strengths of the examined methodologies.