Abstract:
Software development has evolved towards increased reuse of pre-existing components and delivery of functional capabilities through service-oriented architectures (SOA). The situation drives service owners to rely on multiple autonomous partners in the service delivery, requiring design of contractual agreements termed service level agreements(SLAs), which are established to provide business obligation guarantees. This study reviews challenges for stakeholders of SOA applications related to specification, implementation, validation, and audit of SLAs in today's distributed, composite software systems.