Quality-driven business policy specification and refinement for service-oriented systems

Enterprise software systems play an essential role in an organization's business operation. Many business rules and regulations governing an organization's operation can be translated into quality requirements of the relevant software systems, such as security, availability, and manageability. For systems implemented using Web Services, the specification and management of these qualities in the form of Web Service policies are often complicated and difficult to be aligned with the initial business requirements. In this paper, we introduce the Hope (High-Level Objective-based Policy for Enterprises) framework that supports, in a systematic manner, the specification of quality-oriented policies at the business level and their refinement into policies at the system/service level. Quality-oriented business requirements are expressed in Hope as quality objectives applied to business entities and further refined or translated into system-level WS-Policy statements. The refinement relies on an application-specific business entity model and application-independent domain quality models. We demonstrate the approach with a case study involving policy specification and refinement in the security domain.