Best Practices for Artifact Versioning in Service-Oriented Systems

This report describes some of the challenges of software versioning in an SOA environment and provides guidance on how to meet these challenges by following industry guidelines and recommended practices. Managing change in software systems becomes more difficult as the software increases in size, complexity, and dependencies. Part of this task is software versioning, in which version identifiers are assigned to software artifacts for the purpose of managing their evolution. However, software versioning is not a self-contained task. Versioning decisions affect a wide range of processes that fall under the broad heading of change management. With the advent of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a software-development paradigm, software versioning has become even more en¬twined with the software life cycle, mainly due to the highly distributed nature, multiproduct outcome, and multilayer implementation of service-oriented systems. The report describes typical items that a versioning policy for a service-oriented system should contain, including which artifacts to version, how to apply version control, and the impact of versioning on each phase of the life cycle within an SOA infrastructure.