Service Oriented Product Lines - Managed Service Level Agreements for Better Quality of Service

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being used for developing service oriented applications as a set of business specific web services and gives more flexibility for the software development industry. However, systematic reusability for developing applications to fit customers' individual needs with high customization is significant to increase the productivity and reusability of such service oriented applications. Software Product Line (SPL) has the ability to prepare core sets of assets in identifiable and reusable manner with manageable variable components. Thus, the combination of SOA and SPL has highlighted the term of Service Oriented Product Line (SOPL), which is used for increasing levels of flexibility and reusability. It helps to develop semantics of variability over identified service components. Likewise, Quality of Service (QoS) attributes play an important role in selection of web services in a SOA environment. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) provide the mechanism with a specification of the verifiable Quality attributes in web services. In this paper, we present our implementation approach of SOPL to manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in SOPL environments by monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) attributes in bundles of web service components. The design and development of service bundles for representing core sets of assets in SOPL are followed by the initial feature based analysis and identification of service components. The management of SLAs is handled by detecting the deviation between actual and acceptable predefined QoS metrics values in previously analysed web service components via Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) language specified templates. The case study based evaluation results indicate the usefulness of research contribution.