Bootstrapping Performance and Dependability Attributes ofWeb Services

Web services gain momentum for developing flexible service-oriented architectures. Quality of service (QoS) issues are not part of the Web service standard stack, although non-functional attributes like performance, dependability or cost and payment play an important role for service discovery, selection, and composition. A lot of research is dedicated to different QoS models, at the same time omitting a way to specify how QoS parameters (esp. the performance related aspects) are assessed, evaluated and constantly monitored. Our contribution in this paper comprises: a) an evaluation approach for QoS attributes of Web services, which works completely service-and provider independent, b) a method to analyze Web service interactions by using our evaluation tool and extract important QoS information without any knowledge about the service implementation. Furthermore, our implementation allows assessing performance specific values (such as latency or service processing time) that usually require access to the server which hosts the service. The result of the evaluation process can be used to enrich existing Web service descriptions with a set of up-to-date QoS attributes, therefore, making it a valuable instrument for Web service selection