Abstract
Web Services technologies and their supporting collection of de facto standards are now reaching the point of maturity where they are appearing in production software systems. Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) using Web Services as an enabling technology are also being discussed widely in the IT press. However, despite the numerous and real advantages of these architectural patterns there are still many software quality challenges that remain unresolved. This is particularly true as we consider more advanced architectures that exploit the technology to its maximum advantage: utility computing and on-demand service discovery and composition, grid computing and multi-agent systems will only become pervasive once the software quality challenges of real-world industrial applications have been addressed. In this paper potential quality issues such as performance, reliability and availability are addressed in terms of the quality assurances that might need to be provided to consumers of services. Proposed XML-based Service Level Agreement (SLA) languages are reviewed as a means of providing these quality assurances in machine-readable ways. We also discuss how SLAs might be automatically negotiated to enable automated, on-demand service discovery and composition. The next section of this paper addresses quality issues from a service provider's perspective. The providers of such services will need to ensure that SLA commitments are met and this poses interesting problems in terms of application management. Network quality of service is currently addressed through such means as IntServ and DiffServ. Research proposals to introduce similar techniques at an application level are described. From the service consumer's perspective, interesting research proposals for proactively ensuring that good quality of service is obtained are also reviewed. These could be particularly important for creating confidence, from a consumer's perspective, in these architectures. Finally, the paper evaluates the challenges and suggests areas where further research is most urgently required.
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Shelly Saunders MSc, BSc (Hons), MBCS (CITP) is an e-commerce Technical Architect, currently employed by ACE Group, a global insurance and reinsurance company. She is also studying part-time for a PhD with the Southampton Institute. She has 12 years experience in the software development industry and has provided the architecture for numerous e-commerce sites for global blue-chip clients. She also has another 5 years experience as a research scientist in the optical communications industry. She holds three patents.
Margaret Ross is Professor of Software Quality at Southampton Solent University, She is an active member of the BCS, being on various Boards, Committees, and Working Parties including the BCS Council, the Quality Specialist Group (Vice Chair and Secretary); BCSWomen Specialist Group (Committee member) and the BCS Ethics Expert Panel. She is a Fellow of the BCS and also a Chartered Engineer and Chartered Scientist.
Geoff Staples is the Chairman of the BCS Quality Specialist Group and a member of the BCS TickIT Committee.
Geoff has been active in various aspects of computing, particularly quality. Geoff has been the Conference Chair or for the BCS Quality Specialist Groups international SQM and INSPIRE conferences are for many years. He is a Fellow of the BCS and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and also a Chartered Engineer
Sean Wellington leads the Communications Engineering Subject Group (CESG) within the Faculty of Technology at Southampton Solent University. The group is responsible for programmes in computer systems and networks, web design, media technology and electronic engineering. Sean has a wide range of academic and research interests, including digital signal processing and multisensor fusion. He is an active member of the Institution of Electrical Engineering (Member 1993, Fellow 2002) and has served on numerous boards and committees.
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Saunders, S., Ross, M., Staples, G. et al. The software quality challenges of service oriented architectures in e-commerce. Software Qual J 14, 65–75 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-006-6002-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-006-6002-2