Evaluating the Service Level Agreements of NDT under WS-Agreement: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Service-Level Agreements (SLA) is one of the well-known mechanisms to manage the services offered by a provider. In software engineering, it is usually taken as the starting point to define the collaboration between the development team and clients. More concretely, an SLA is a part of a service contract where the level of service is formally defined. In this document, both providers and clients purchase commitments that rule the working guidelines in a software project. However, despite its relevance, sometimes it is difficult or too subjective to assure that providers and clients are following SLA. This paper proposes a research approach based on the standard WS-Agreement and model-based paradigms that offers a mechanism for SLA testing and presents an initial evaluation of this approach in a Web methodology named NDT (Navigational Development Techniques). The paper refers to some practical experiences so as to evaluate the quality of the results, as well as introduces a new research line as a future work.