Quality models for web services: A systematic mapping

• 47 Different quality models for web services from 65 papers have been analyzed.
• A chronological view of these quality models has been given, and their relationships stated.
• Quality models have been evaluated in terms of size and definition coverage.
• Quality factors addressed by quality models have been studied under ISO/IEC 25010 perspective.
• The most consolidated quality factors have been identified and defined.

ContextQuality of Service (QoS) is a major issue in various web service related activities. Quality models have been proposed as the engineering artefact to provide a common framework of understanding for QoS, by defining the quality factors that apply to web service usage.ObjectiveThe goal of this study is to evaluate the current state of the art of the proposed quality models for web services, specifically: (1) which are these proposals and how are they related; (2) what are their structural characteristics; (3) what quality factors are the most and least addressed; and (4) what are their most consolidated definitions.MethodWe have conducted a systematic mapping by defining a robust protocol that combines automatic and manual searches from different sources. We used a rigorous method to elicitate the keywords from the research questions and a selection criteria to retrieve the final papers to evaluate. We have adopted the ISO/IEC 25010 standard to articulate our analysis.ResultsWe have evaluated 47 different quality models from 65 papers that fulfilled the selection criteria. By analyzing in depth these quality models, we have: (1) distributed the proposals along the time dimension and identified their relationships; (2) analyzed their size (visualizing the number of nodes and levels) and definition coverage (as indicator of quality of the proposals); (3) quantified the coverage of the different ISO/IEC 25010 quality factors by the proposals; (4) identified the quality factors that appeared in at least 30% of the surveyed proposals and provided the most consolidated definitions for them.ConclusionsWe believe that this panoramic view on the anatomy of the quality models for web services may be a good reference for prospective researchers and practitioners in the field and especially may help avoiding the definition of new proposals that do not align with current research.

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