Effect of Data Validity on the Reliability of Data-centric Web Services

Reliability is an essential quality requirement for web services. Existing techniques for measuring reliability of web services mainly focus on failures caused by code-based defects. For data-centric web services, the reliability of services can be significantly affected by the quality of data used to provide services. However, the impact of data quality on the reliability of web services has rarely been explored. We present an approach to estimate data quality and to incorporate data quality with the reliability of software components in the reliability estimation of web services. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we present a case study on a government web service. In this study we observed that more than 60% of service failures reported over a three-month period were caused by invalid data. The results show that by taking into account data quality, the reliability estimate of the web service is more accurate than the traditional reliability measurement.