Feature interactions in Web services

Web services promise to allow businesses to adapt rapidly to changes in the business environment, and the needs of different 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. Whereas most current work on web services has focused on low-level standards for publishing, discovering, and invoking services, our research looks at the problems that can arise from service integration, and how to manage them. In this paper we argue that service integration issues can be understood as feature interactions, and identify an initial set of feature interactions between web services. We also highlight the importance of considering the non-functional requirements of services (such as privacy or security) for understanding feature interactions between web services.