A contribution to the automation and to the evaluation of open-system software architectures

Recently, companies are getting better at identifying their business expectations: they need an architecture that is in line with these latter. This explains why Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) grew markedly these last years and why more and more organizations are attracted by this challenge; its strengths (reusability, costs benefits and productivity increase) perfectly correlate with companies needs. This technology could bring a lot of benefits but there may also appear some major complications while disrupting the company organization to adopt it. First and foremost among these is the risk of not being able to favorably answer to expectations in terms of quality of services. As these risks are distributed through all the services, the question of evaluating the quality of SOAs has recently arisen, especially prior to switching to an SOA. This paper presents a model (the SOAQE model) which has been validated by the software engineering community as the groundwork for the implementation of our prototype and whose mission is to decompose any service oriented architecture with the aim of evaluating it easier, and a tool (the SOAQE tool) which has been imagined by our team to assess the quality of an SOA. The latter offers a new way of collecting the results of the quality evaluation of an SOA as we intend to get a finite value plus an advanced graphical visualization of the results.