Contract compliance monitoring of web services

Abstract

Design and implementation via contractual specifications helps designers and programmers understand and analyze when the requirements have been elicited according to the client' desires. In general, software is released when some tests have been successfully passed. However, these tests only cover a finite set of possible executions. But in systems such as web services, which involve a set of heterogeneous parties, it is difficult to identify an appropriate set of tests because their execution tends to be nondeterministic since most rely on underlying software systems where most of the information is hidden due to copyright or security concerns. In this work, we propose that the use of contract specifications, such us C-O Diagrams, allow one to specify and codify a system, where once the software has been released it is still possible to check if the execution conforms to a given contract. To achieve this goal, we purpose a monitoring technique, where all actions specified in a contract are recorded in a log that will be used by the monitor software to check if the contract is being fulfilled and alerting all parties when it is not so that the system can force reparations. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.