Managing web service quality

Abstract

The IT industry is beginning to mirror a trend of specialization and outsourcing that has been present for decades in other industries, such as the automotive industry. We are beginning to see the emergence of specialist service providers, such as CRM services and market places, payment and settlement services, bill presentment services and many others. Organizations increasingly use these services in complex enterprise application systems using web service infrastructures. Unlike the automotive industry, however, the IT industry does not yet have an agreed way to manage web service quality. In this talk, I will focus on managing the service quality of web services that are used across organizational boundaries. I discuss the systematic definition of formal service level agreement languages that support the precise definition of service quality, such as latency, throughput, availability and reliability. I present how service level agreements written in these languages can be used and describe how service level agreements can be policed. I conclude the talk by sketching further research that is necessary before we have a similar grip on quality as other engineering disciplines.