Managing Web Service Interface Complexity via an OO Metric-based Early Approach

Abstract

Web Services have been steadily gaining maturity as their adoption in the software industry grew. Accordingly, metric suites for assessing different quality attributes of Web Service artifacts have been proposed recently -e.g., for services interfaces in WSDL (Web Service Description Language). Like any other software artifact, WSDL documents have several inherent attributes (e.g., size or complexity) that can be measured. We present an approach to prevent a high complexity on services interfaces (WSDLs), to ease consumers to reason about services' offered functionality. Mostly, WSDLs are automatically derived from object-oriented (OO) source code, with a likely impact on complexity. Thereby, we study the statistical relationships between a recent metric suite of service interface complexity (proposed by Baski & Misra) and the well-known Chidamber & Kemerer's OO metric suite (applied to service implementations), on a data-set of 154 real-world services. First, a theoretical validation of Baski & Misra's suite (using Weyuker's properties) is presented, to prove the ability to measure complexity in WSDL documents. Then, after finding high correlation between both metric suites, we have conducted a series of experiments to analyze how certain refactorings on services' source codes prior to derive WSDLs might reduce complexity. In this way, our approach exploits OO metrics as development-time indicators, to guide software developers towards obtaining less complex service interfaces.

COBOL Systems Migration to SOA: Assessing Antipatterns and Complexity

“…After a quantitative and qualitative analysis, a conclusive evidence arises in favor of the COB2SOA approach, in terms of balanced trade-off between quality and time. As future work, we expect to conduct another study concerning well-known OO metrics from Chidamber & Kemerer [8], from which we have found a correlation with the BM metric suite [3,23]. By considering the OO back-ends of the SOA frontiers that are generated in the three approaches we might early analyze another refactoring opportunities to then generate improved WSDLs with lowest complexity -i.e., increasing comprehension and interoperability.…”

On the impact of service-oriented patterns on software evolvability: a controlled experiment and metric-based analysis

“…As a measure for complexity, we selected cyclomatic complexity (CC) from McCabe (1976) as a traditional source code metric. While some suggestions for service-based complexity metrics like response for operation (Perepletchikov et al, 2007) or Message Entropy (Mateos et al, 2017) exist, tool support for their collection is not available and they are hard to calculate manually. Despite its criticisms (Ostberg & Wagner, 2014), we therefore relied on the widely used CC metric that was gathered for each service via SonarQube.…”

Peer Review #1 of "On the impact of service-oriented patterns on software evolvability: a controlled experiment and metric-based analysis (v0.2)"

“…To gain further granularity-related insights in addition to the means and medians of our two volume metrics, we also calculated their ratio, (Perepletchikov et al, 2007) or Message Entropy (ME) (Mateos et al, 2017) exist, tool support for their collection is not available and they are hard to calculate manually.…”