The quantitative Measurement of Quality in Service-oriented Software Engineering: Methods, Applications, and Issues

Service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) enables rapid and cost-efficient development of distributed software even in heterogeneous environments where deliver its solutions as services. SOSE aims at providing methods and tools to enhance the quality of products and make software development as beneficial as possible. A challenging issue in SOSE is providing services with the required quality which contributes in cost-efficient software development. To this end, the quantitative measurement of quality is crucial. There are several valuable works in literature for quantifying different quality aspects of service-oriented solutions. However, each of the existing works has some strengths and weaknesses. Here we try to survey the literature on the quantitative measurement of the various aspects of service's quality in SOSE. To do so, we propose a model for quality assessment of services. Based on the proposed model, we categorize existing methods and analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and applications. The results of our analysis and comparisons make it possible to select the most appropriate method for quantifying each quality aspect of services which, to the best of our knowledge, is not available in the literature.