Certification Matters for Service Markets

Whenever customers have to decide between different instances of the same product, they are interested in buying the best product. In contrast, companies are interested in reducing the construction effort (and usually as a consequence thereof, the quality) to gain profit. The described setting is widely known as opposed preferences in quality of the product and also applies to the context of service-oriented computing. In general, service-oriented computing emphasizes the construction of large software systems out of existing services, where services are small and self-contained pieces of software that adhere to a specified interface. Several implementations of the same interface are considered as several instances of the same service. Thereby, customers are interested in buying the best service implementation for their service composition wrt. to metrics, such as costs, energy, memory consumption, or execution time. One way to ensure the service quality is to employ certificates, which can come in different kinds: Technical certificates proving correctness can be automatically constructed by the service provider and again be automatically checked by the user. Digital certificates allow proof of the integrity of a product. Other certificates might be rolled out if service providers follow a good software construction principle, which is checked in annual audits. Whereas all of these certificates are handled differently in service markets, what they have in common is that they influence the buying decisions of customers. In this paper, we review state-of-the-art developments in certification with respect to service-oriented computing. We not only discuss how certificates are constructed and handled in service-oriented computing but also review the effects of certificates on the market from an economic perspective.