Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A comprehensive quality model for service-oriented systems

  • Published:
Software Quality Journal Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In a service-oriented system, a quality (or Quality of Service) model is used (i) by service requesters to specify the expected quality levels of service delivery; (ii) by service providers to advertise quality levels that their services achieve; and (iii) by service composers when selecting among alternative services those that are to participate in a service composition. Expressive quality models are needed to let requesters specify quality expectations, providers advertise service qualities, and composers finely compare alternative services. Having observed many similarities between various quality models proposed in the literature, we review these and integrate them into a single quality model, called QVDP. We highlight the need for integration of priority and dependency information within any quality model for services and propose precise submodels for doing so. Our intention is for the proposed model to serve as a reference point for further developments in quality models for service-oriented systems. To this aim, we extend the part of the UML metamodel specialized for Quality of Service with QVDP concepts unavailable in UML.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://gpod.eo.esa.int.

  2. http://eopi.esa.int/esa/esa?type=file&ts=1186489893497&table=aotarget&cmd=image&id=1260.

  3. According to the relevant ISO standard (International Organization for Standardization 1998), QoS refers to characteristics that contribute to the overall quality of a service as perceived by the consumer of the service. A QoS characteristic is a quantifiable aspect of QoS which is defined independently of the means by which it is represented, managed, or controlled.

References

  • Basili, V. R., & Rombach, H. D. (1988). The TAME project: Towards improvement-oriented software environments. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 14(6), 758–773.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Battle, S., Bernstein, A., Boley, H., Grosof, B., Gruninger, M., Hull, R., et al. (2005). Semantic web services framework (swsf).

  • Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., & Lassila, O. (2001, May). The semantic web. Scientific American.

  • Boehm, B. W., Brown, J. R., Kaspar, H., Lipow, M., Macleod, G. J., & Merrit, M. J. (1978). Characteristics of software quality. North-Holland.

  • Brafman, R. I., Domshlak, C., & Shimony, S. E. (2006). On graphical modeling of preference and importance. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 25, 389–424.

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Brahnmath, G., Raje, R. R., Olson, A., Auguston, M., Bryant, B. R., & Burt, C. C. (2002). A quality of service catalogue for software components. In Proceedings of the Southeastern Software Engineering Conference.

  • Castro, J., Kolp, M., & Mylopoulos, J. (2002). Towards requirements-driven information systems engineering: the Tropos project. Information Systems, 27(6).

  • Christensen, E., Curbera, F., Meredith, G., & Weerawarana, S. (2001). Web services description language (wsdl 1.1).

  • International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation. (2005). Service-oriented architecture. IBM Systems Journal, 44(4).

  • D’Ambrogio, A. (2006). A model-driven wsdl extension for describing the qos of web services. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Services (ICWS’06).

  • Deming, W. E. (1982). Quality, productivity, and competitive position. Massachusets Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study.

  • Feigenbaum, A. V. (1951). Quality control: Principles, practice, and administration. McGraw-Hill.

  • Frolund, S., & Koistinen, J. (1998). Qml: A language for quality of service specification. Technical report. Palo Alto, CA: HP Laboratories.

  • Gravin, D. A. (1988). Managing quality: The strategic and competitive edge. Free Press.

  • Gruber, T. R. (1993). A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), 199–220.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Herssens, C., Jureta, I. J., & Faulkner, S. (2008a). Capturing and using QoS relationships to improve service selection. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’08).

  • Herssens, C., Jureta, I. J., & Faulkner, S. (2008b). Dealing with quality tradeoffs during service selection. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’08).

  • Horrocks, I. (2002). DAML+OIL: A description logic for the semantic web. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 25(1), 4–9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P. F., Boley, H., Tabet, S., Grosof, B., & Dean, M. (2003). Swrl: A semantic web rule language combining owl and ruleml.

  • IEEE. (1989). Software engineering standards. IEEE.

  • International Organization for Standardization. (1986). ISO 8402 Quality management and quality assurance—Vocabulary. International Organization for Standardization.

  • International Organization for Standardization. (1998). Cd15935 information technology: Open distributed processing—reference model—quality of service.

  • Ishikawa, K. (1985). What is total quality control? The Japanese way. Prentice Hall.

  • Juran, J. M. (1951). Quality control handbook. McGraw-Hill.

  • Jureta, I. J., Faulkner, S., Achbany, Y., & Saerens, M. (2007a). Dynamic task allocation wihin an open service-oriented mas architecture. In Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agents Systems (AAMAS’07).

  • Jureta, I. J., Faulkner, S., Achbany, Y., & Saerens, M. (2007b). Dynamic web service composition within a service-oriented architecture. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Services (ICWS’07).

  • Jureta, I. J., Faulkner, S., & Thiran, P. (2007c). Dynamic requirements specification for adaptable and open service-oriented systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC’07).

  • Jureta, I. J., Mylopoulos, J., & Faulkner, S. (2008). Revisiting the core ontology and problem in requirements engineering. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE’08).

  • Keller, A., & Ludwig, H. (2003). The wsla framework: Specifying and monitoring service level agreements for web services. Journal of Network Systems Management, 11(1).

  • Kephart, J. O., & Chess, D. M. (2003). The vision of autonomic computing. IEEE Computer, 36(1), 41–50.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loyall, J. P., Schantz, R. E., Zinky, J. A., & Bakken, D. E. (1998) Specifying and measuring quality of service in distributed object systems. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing.

  • Maximilien, E. M., & Singh, M. P. (2004). Toward autonomic services trust and selection. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC’04).

  • McIlraith, S. A., & Martin, D. L. (2003). Bringing semantics to web services. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18(1), 90–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McIlraith, S. A., Son, T. C., & Zeng, H. (2001). Semantic web services. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(2), 46–53.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Object Management Group. (1997). The corba trading services.

  • Object Management Group. (2005, May). Uml profile for modeling qos and fault tolerance characteristics and mechanisms specification, v1.0.

  • Osterweil, L. (1996). Strategic directions in software quality. ACM Computing Surveys, 28(4), 738–750.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Papazoglou, M. P., & Georgakopoulos, D. (2003). Service-oriented computing. Communications of the ACM, 46(10), 24–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ran, S., (2003). A model for web services discovery with QoS. ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 4(1), 1–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reeves, C. A., & Bednar, D. A. (1994). Defining quality: Alternatives and implications. The Academy of Management Review, Special Issue: Total Quality, 19(3), 419–445.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shadbolt, N., Berners-Lee, T., & Wendy, H. (2006). The semantic web revisited. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(3), 96–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skene, J., Lamanna, D. D., & Emmerich, W. (2004). Precise service level agreements. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’04).

  • Staab, S., & Studer, R. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook on ontologies. international handbooks on information systems. Springer.

  • Staehli, R., Eliassen, F., Aagedal, J. O., & Blair, G. (2003). Quality of service semantics for component-based systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Reflective and Adaptive Middleware Systems.

  • Tennenhouse, D. (2000). Proactive computing. Communications of the ACM, 43(5), 43–50.

  • Tosic, V., Esfandiari, B., Pagurek, B., & Patel, K. (2002). On requirements for ontologies in management of web services. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Web Services, e-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES’02).

  • Zeng, L., Benatallah, B., Dumas, M., Kalagnanam, J. & Sheng, Q. Z. (2003). Quality driven web services composition. In Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW’03).

  • Zeng, L., Lei, H., & Chang, H. (2007). Monitoring the QoS of web services. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC’07).

  • Zhou, C., Chia, L.-T., & Lee, B.-S. (2004). Daml-qos ontology for web services. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Services (ICWS’04).

Download references

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Emmanuel Mathot of the European Space Agency, who provided precise information about the GPOD project and assisted our efforts in describing quality information of services related to the GPOD project. The first author acknowledges funding from the Belgian ICM/CIM Doctoral Fellowship Program.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Management Research Unit (IMRU), University of Namur, 8, rempart de la vierge, 5000, Namur, Belgium

    Ivan J. Jureta & Stéphane Faulkner

  2. Information Systems Research Unit, Université de Louvain, 1, Place des Doyens, 1348, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

    Caroline Herssens

Authors
  1. Ivan J. Jureta
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Caroline Herssens
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Stéphane Faulkner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ivan J. Jureta.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Jureta, I.J., Herssens, C. & Faulkner, S. A comprehensive quality model for service-oriented systems. Software Qual J 17, 65–98 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-008-9059-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-008-9059-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation