Tools for Continuously Evaluating Distributed System Qualities

Developers are increasingly using service-oriented middleware to develop distributed systems. This middleware raises the abstraction level for software so that distributed-system developers can focus more on application-level concerns (for instance, business logic) rather than wrestle with infrastructure-level concerns (such as software adaptation, context-awareness, and life-cycle management). Service-oriented middleware also promotes reuse of business logic and services across heterogeneous application domains, thus facilitating the development of larger, more complex systems.