The emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an architectural approach for integrating applications that expose services presents many new challenges to organizations possibly resulting in significant risks. Particularly important among those risks are failures to effectively address quality attribute requirements such as performance, availability, security, and modifiability. In Quality Attributes and Service-Oriented Architectures we undertook a thorough examination of the relationship between SOA and quality attributes.

Evaluating Architectures Using an SOA Approach

For the evaluation of a system that uses SOA, it is important to focus on the service integration and communication patterns in addition to the architectures of the underlying integrated applications. Our goal is to aid practitioners using the SOA approach by investigating the quality attribute related issues associated with using SOA. Practical information to assist in evaluating architectures that use the SOA approach can be found in Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture.

Our near term plans include a report that surveys the state-of-practice for ensuring quality of service by contract and offer guidelines to organizations that work with external services providers on how to ensure that services are provided with high availability, security, performance and other required qualities. Below are some of the questions we will focus on:

• In this new model for business-to-business relations, what mechanisms have been used to ensure quality of service by contract?
• What quality properties have been expressed in service-level agreements? What mechanisms have been used by service providers to achieve and monitor those qualities?
• What support is there in the service technologies to express quality requirements and what's being formulated for the future with that respect?

The SEI architecture team is looking for industrial collaborators to pilot the integrated methods and to explore the connections with existing software and system development paradigms. The SEI is also looking for collaborations exploring connections with aspects, service-oriented architecture, open source, model-driven architectures, J2EE, or .net. Contact information and additional opportunities are located in the Collaboration Opportunities in Software Architecture pages on our site.

Software Architecture Training and Publications

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Related Reading

Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture
Phil Bianco, Rick Kotermanski, & Paulo Merson

Quality Attributes and Service-Oriented Architectures
Liam O'Brien, Len Bass, & Paulo Merson