On Feature Interactions Among Web Services

Web Services promise to allow businesses to adapt rapidly to changes in the business environment and to the needs of customers. However, the rapid introduction of new services paired with the dynamicity of the business environment also leads to undesirable interactions that negatively impact service quality and user satisfaction. In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling such undesirable interactions as feature interactions. As each functional feature ultimately is motivated by non-functional requirements, we make an explicit distinction between functional and non-functional features. We then describe our approach for detecting and resolving feature interactions among Web Services. The approach is based on goal-oriented analysis and scenario modeling. It allows us to reason about feature interactions in terms of goal conflicts and feature deployment. Three case studies illustrate the approach. The paper concludes with a discussion of our findings and an outlook on future research.