The use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) is a popular approach for developing complex heterogeneous systems. Although there are benefits that can be gained from using SOA such as interoperability, modifiability, agility; other qualities of an SOA, such as performance, security and testability, can be difficult to measure. This tutorial will focus on early-lifecycle modelling of performance characteristics and Quality of Service (QoS) of SOAs. The tutorial will also examine the use of the evaluation results in the definition and monitoring of service level agreements (SLAs).

Topics to be covered include:

• Quality attributes and SOAs
• Early lifecycle predictions in SOAs
• Performance and QoS modelling
• Concepts
• Method
• Example (Whole-of-government SOA)
• Tool support
• Techniques for measuring and improving the performance of SOAs
• Understanding and evaluating architecture alternatives
• Establishing SLAs based on performance and QoS modelling

About your tutors:
Dr Liam O’Brien has over 18 years experience in software engineering research and development. He is a Principal Researcher at NICTA’s e-Government Initiative. He is responsible for areas relevant to e-Government, including SOAs, service migration, service integration, scoping of SOA and cost and effort estimation. Prior to joining NICTA he was Research Area Leader for the Software Product Lines area at Lero – the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre – and before that was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. He holds a BSc and PhD from the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Paul Brebner has more than 25 years experience in software engineering research and development. He is a senior researcher in NICTA’s e-Government Initiative. He is responsible for the development of performance modelling methods and tools, and the application of these technologies to e-Government projects. He is interested in enterprise architectures and technologies, middleware, object orientation, Java, Web and Service Orientation, and distributed systems. He has extensive experience in the performance of enterprise technologies and SOAs. He has published papers and a Cutter Consortium report on the evaluation of Java Enterprise technologies, and has contributed to the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) enterprise Java benchmarks. Paul previously worked for CSIRO, University College London (UCL), Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TR&D, Softway Pty Ltd, and Waikato University. He holds an MSc (1st class honours) from Waikato University.