Benchmark Dataset Selection of Web Services Technologies: A Factor Analysis

Abstract

Web services have emerged as an accessible technology with the standard 'Extensible Mark Up' (XML) language, which is known as 'Web Services Description Language' WSDL. Web services have become a promising technology to promote the interrelationship between service providers and users. Web services users' trust is measured by quality metrics. Web service quality metrics vary in many benchmark datasets used in the existing studies. The selection of a benchmark dataset is problematic to classify and retest web services. This paper proposes a method to rank web services quality metrics for the selection of benchmark web services datasets. To measure the diversity in quality metrics, factor analysis with Varimax rotation and scree plot is a well-established method. We use factor analysis to determine percentage variance among principal factors of four benchmark datasets. Our results showed that the two-factor solution explained 94.501, 76.524, and 45.009% variances in datasets A, B, and D, respectively. A three-factor solution explained 85.085% variance in dataset C. Reliability, and response time quality metrics were predicted as the most dominating quality metrics that contributed to explain the percentage variance in four datasets. Our proposed web metric ranking (WMR) method resulted in reliability as the top-most web metric with (57.62%) score and latency web metric at the bottom-most with (3.60%) score. The proposed WMR method showed a high (96.17%) ranking precision. Obtained results verified that factor solutions after reducing the dimensions could be generalized and used in the quality improvement of web services. In future works, the authors plan to focus on a dataset with dominating quality metrics to perform regression testing of web services.