Automatic Generation of Test-beds for Pre-Deployment QoS Evaluation of Web Services

In last years both industry and academia have shown a great interest on issues concerning consistent cooperation for business-critical services. Service Level Agreement (SLA) specifications as well as techniques for their treatment are nowadays irremissible assets.The availability of many computer processable information make the Web Services framework a valid candidate to experiment with new ideas. This paper proposes Puppet (Pick UP Performance Evaluation Test-bed), an approach for the automatic generation of test-beds to empirically evaluate different QoS features of a Web Service under development. Specifically, the generation exploits the information about the coordinating scenario (be it choreography or orchestration), the service description (WSDL) and the specification of the agreements (WS-Agreements) that the roles will abide. The approach is supported by a proof-of-concept tool to validate the feasibility of the idea.