Handling Faults in Service Oriented Computing: A Comprehensive Study

Abstract

Recently, service-oriented computing paradigms have become a trending development direction, in which software systems are built using a set of loosely coupled services distributed over multiple locations through a service-oriented architecture. Such systems encounter different challenges, as integration, performance, reliability, availability, etc., which made all associated testing activities to be another major challenge to avoid their faults and system failures. Services are considered the substantial element in service-oriented computing. Thus, the quality of services and the service dependability in a web service composition have become essential to manage faults within these software systems. Many studies addressed web service faults from diverse perspectives. In this paper, a comprehensive study is conducted to investigate the different perspectives to manipulate web service faults, including fault tolerance, fault injection, fault prediction and fault localization. An extensive comparison is provided, highlighting the main research gaps, challenges and limitations of each perspective for web services. An analytical discussion is then followed to suggest future research directions that can be adopted to face such obstacles by improving fault handling capabilities for an efficient testing in service-oriented computing systems.