In this paper, the authors perform a mapping between the state of the art and current research trends in quality models for web services and the industry-standard ISO 25010, aiming to provide a good reference for researchers and new practitioners in the quality models field.

The topic is extremely relevant. Web services are used in all of the domains governed by information technology infrastructures, such as healthcare, justice, procurement, and government. By definition, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) implemented using web services are decoupled for service users (clients) and service providers (servers). Quality of service (QoS) metrics, covering both sides of this communication, are crucial aspects that can make an SOA successful or an unusable catastrophe.

The authors started the mapping with an initial set of 2298 papers from three different databases (IEEE Xplore, ISI Web of Science, and ACM Digital Library), ending with 65 after several refinement steps. It has been found that the quality models proposed provide different answers to the question: What criteria make a good service?

The paper rigorously presents the methodology used to achieve the mapping. The authors followed the Kitchenham and Charters guidelines (coming from medical research) [1]. They highlighted the need for such a mapping, the plan, the keywords used in the search, and rigorous selection criteria that permitted the above-mentioned filtering (from 2298 to 65). The results of the mapping contain some relevant observations; for example, most of the proposed quality models do not consider industry needs (the reference model ISO 25010).