The increasing popularity of application service providers and Web services (WS) is motivating a shift from buying software products to outsourcing software services. This is renewing interest in automatic negotiation, which is quite a mature field. Unfortunately, most current approaches do not take common software engineering principles into account. As a result, existing solutions are usually ad hoc and difficult to integrate.

In this paper, the authors report on a framework for integrating existing negotiation proposals; they focus on the language they have designed to describe service profiles, negotiation protocols, strategies, tactics, and so on. To the best of my knowledge, this is one of the very first proposals that delves into these topics from a software engineering perspective, but it has a number of shortcomings: only English auctions and bilateral bargaining are supported; no knowledge from previous negotiations can be reused; no implementation of the framework is available; a very limited simulator is used; and the authors seem to preclude the existence of WS-agreement and WS-negotiation (these standards are still under development, but a comparison with them would have helped put the paper in a proper context).

The paper is well suited for an informal tutorial, but it is very shallow, since it just describes an example. The reader who wants to gain a deeper understanding must necessarily delve into the first author’s PhD dissertation [1]. I also recommend other papers [2,3] for an in-depth introduction to the implications of negotiating software services.