A Systematic Mapping Study of Specification Languages in Cloud Services Development

Specification languages offer abstractions and notations that facilitate the systematic and analytical reasoning about important aspects in a specific domain problematic. In a software engineering process domain, the usage of specification languages improve the quality and delivery time of the artefacts generated during the execution of the process activities. Cloud applications, or cloud services, are service-oriented applications whose consumption is constantly growing; however, their development require support for new roles and activities. In this work we are interested in knowing how specification languages are being used by researchers and practitioners to support the development of cloud services. This work presents a systematic mapping that provides guidance to determine the current state and to characterize the specification languages that support the service life cycle activities in a cloud services development domain.