A Fault Taxonomy for Service-Oriented Architecture

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a popular design paradigm for distributed systems today. Its dynamics and loose coupling are predestined for self-adaptive systems. This adaptivity and complexity, however, opens many chances for a failure. Therefore, a clear understanding of the kinds of faults that may occur is necessary for detection, tolerance, and testing, e.g. by fault injection. For this purpose, we present a fault taxonomy for service-oriented architecture. Starting with a definition of service and SOA, we describe and analyze different structures and the process of service invocation with a five step model. Furthermore, we describe possible faults and define SOAspecific faults as a new fault class that extends the known fault set for distributed systems. The application of our fault taxonomy is demonstrated with the use case of an online airline reservation system. We conclude with the benefits of our fault taxonomy for designing and testing SOA-based systems