Sudeep Mallick

A Combinatorial Procurement Auction for QoS-Aware Web Services Composition

Business processes and application functionality are becoming available as internal web services inside enterprise boundaries as well as becoming available as commercial web services from enterprise solution vendors and web services marketplaces. Typically there are multiple web service providers offering services capable of fulfilling a particular functionality, although with different Quality of Service (QoS). Dynamic creation of business processes requires composing an appropriate set of web services that best suit the current need. This paper presents a novel combinatorial auction approach to QoS aware dynamic web services composition. Such an approach would enable not only stand-alone web services but also composite web services to be a part of a business process. The combinatorial auction leads to an integer programming formulation for the web services composition problem. An important feature of the model is the incorporation of service level agreements. We describe a software tool QWESC for QoS-aware web services composition based on the proposed approach.

A Survey of Enterprise Software Development Risks in a Flat World

The longer a fault remains in the code from the time it was injected, the more time it will take to fix the fault. Increasingly, automated fault detection (AFD) tools are providing developers with prompt feedback on recently-introduced faults to reduce fault fix time. If however, the frequency and content of this feedback does not match the developers goals and/or workflow, the developer may ignore the information. We conducted a controlled study with 18 developers to explore what factors are used by developers to decide whether or not to address a fault when notified of the error. The findings of our study lead to several conjectures about the design of AFD tools to effectively notify developers of faults in the coding phase. The AFD tools should present fault information that is relevant to the primary programming task with accurate and precise descriptions. The fault severity and the specific timing of fault notification should be customizable. Finally, the AFD tool must be accurate and reliable to build trust with the developer.COTS-based development and global delivery are two major disrupters in modern software development arena. Economic benefits offered by these disrupters cannot be neglected by organizations of any size. Unfortunately, alongside these benefits are several risk factors, which if ill-managed can cost the organizations both in terms of revenue and time. At Infosys, one of Indias leading software services organizations, built upon global delivery model we conducted a study by interviewing representatives from 23 projects to identify risks pertinent to COTS-based development in a global setting. We found 6 frequently occurring risks that will be summarized in this paper.

Web services in the retail industry

It is a well-known fact that the retail industry always works on razorthin margins and the key to survival lies in optimization of resources both in space and time dimensions as well as maximization of customer satisfaction. Access to timely and even real-time information to a wide variety of channel and trading partners, sales personnel, line managers, store managers etc. is the key to achieving this. Web services technology holds out a lot of promise for the retail industry in this respect. It is a platform-neutral, easy to deploy set of standards for achieving business data and process integration, without going for proprietary point to point connections. It promises to connect the information providers and information consumers across a wide variety of platforms, devices and on an on-demand basis. Being based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles it can also form the enabling service interface layer for other emerging technologies like BAM, BPM, mobile and RFID. In this paper, we attempt to understand information-flow needs in the retail industry and also suggest a roadmap approach by which the retail enterprise could exploit the potential of web services at minimal risk.

Light Weight SOA Governance A Case Study

Here, we present a case study of an ABC company which has recently embarked on a SOA exercise and has adopted a light weight SOA governance process. In SOA Governance world, Service registry and repository play a pivotal role. Service registry can have policies that are needed to govern and enforce the lifecycle management of service. In this case study, we also address versioning and categorization of services using registry.

Capturing web services provider constraints: an algorithmic approach

In the SOA paradigm service composition enables creation of business processes and workflows by assembling together simple or composite services in a particular sequence. In such a distributed architecture possibly involving multiple service providers, optimal selection of service implementations from an existing pool of services, based on QoS and cost factors assumes critical practical relevance. In this paper, we analyze various complex service provider configurations, where multiple business functionalities (comprising a business process) are available as simple or composite services from multiple service providers (some possibly working in coalitions) at varying QoS and cost attribute values. We study the service composition constraints resulting in such a context and propose an algorithm to formally capture these special constraints and represent these into simple weighted multi-stage graphs suitable for subsequent application of various optimization techniques cited in the literature.