WS-DREAM: A distributed reliability assessment Mechanism for Web Services

It is critical to guarantee the reliability of service-oriented applications. This is because they may employ remote Web services as components, which may easily become unavailable in the unpredictable Internet environment. This practical experience report presents a distribute reliability assessment mechanism for Web services (WS-DREAM), allowing users to carry out Web services reliability assessment in a collaborative manner. With WS-DREAM, users in different geography locations help each other to carry out testing, and share test cases under the coordination of a centralized server. Based on this collaborative mechanism, reliability assessment for Web services in real environment from different locations of the world becomes seamless. To illustrate the advantage of this mechanism, a prototype is implemented and a case study is carried out. Users from five locations all over the world perform reliability assessment to Web services distributed in six countries. Over 1,000,000 test cases are executed in a collaborative manner and detailed results are provided.