A Design Quality Model for Service-Oriented Architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is emerging as an effective solution to deal with rapid changes in the business environment. To handle fast-paced changes, organizations need to be able to assess the quality of its products prior to implementation. However, literature and industry has yet to explore the techniques for evaluating design quality of SOA artifacts. To address this need, this paper presents a hierarchical quality assessment model for early assessment of SOA system quality. By defining desirable quality attributes and tracing necessary metrics required to measure them, the approach establishes an assessment model for identification of metrics at different abstraction levels. Using the model, design problems can be detected and resolved before they work into the implemented system where they are more difficult to resolve. The model is validated against an empirical study on an existing SOA system to evaluate the quality impact from explicit and implicit changes to its requirements.