Analytical Quality Assurance

As we described in Chapter 1, Services are often provisioned within short-term, volatile and highly dynamic (business) processes. These processes are designed in an abstract manner and when instantiated can involve service providers not known of during the design time of the service-based application. Thus, different from traditional software systems, service-based applications require the composition and coordination of services within highly distributed environments, cutting across the administrative boundaries of various organizations. This chapter provides a review of quality contracts, or more generally, those parts of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which deal with statements about the services quality levels on which the service requestor and the providers have reached an agreement. Aspects of the contracts, such as the identification of parties, legal obligations and penalties for contract violation, are not covered by this chapter.