The authors discuss the interplay between the notions of contract compliance, contract refinement, and choreography conformance in the context of service oriented computing, by considering both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Service contracts are specified in a language independent way by means of finite labeled transition systems. In this way, the theory is general and foundational as the authors abstract away from the syntax of contracts and simply assume that a contract language has an operational semantics defined in terms of a labeled transition system. The chapter makes a comparative analysis of synchronous and asynchronous communication. Concerning the latter, a realistic scenario is considered in which services are endowed with queues used to store the received messages. In the simpler context of synchronous communication, the authors are able to resort to the theory of fair testing to provide decidability results.
