Soa Antipatterns: An Approach for Their Specification and Detection

Abstract

Like any other large and complex software systems, Service Based Systems (SBSs) must evolve to fit new user requirements and execution contexts. The changes resulting from the evolution of SBSs may degrade their design and quality of service (QoS) and may often cause the appearance of common poor solutions in their architecture, called antipatterns, in opposition to design patterns, which are good solutions to recurring problems. Antipatterns resulting from these changes may hinder the future maintenance and evolution of SBSs. The detection of antipatterns is thus crucial to assess the design and QoS of SBSs and facilitate their maintenance and evolution. However, methods and techniques for the detection of antipatterns in SBSs are still in their infancy despite their importance. In this paper, we introduce a novel and innovative approach supported by a framework for specifying and detecting antipatterns in SBSs. Using our approach, we specify ten well-known and common antipatterns, including Multi Service and Tiny Service, and automatically generate their detection algorithms. We apply and validate the detection algorithms in terms of precision and recall on two systems developed independently, (1) Home-Automation, an SBS with 13 services, and (2) FraSCAti, an open-source implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard with more than 100 services. This validation demonstrates that our approach enables the specification and detection of SOA antipatterns with an average precision of 90% and recall of 97.5%.

A Lightweight Approach for Specification and Detection of SOAP Anti-Patterns

“…Moha et al [9] presented a technique supplemented with a tool SODA to specify and identify the anti-patterns in SCA systems. Authors performed experiments on two different corpora i.e., Home automation system and Frascati service component architecture.…”

“…Anti-patterns of SOAP based web services are detected with high precision and recall but only for some specific services. The tool SODA-W, an extension of SOFA framework [9] uses already established DSL for the detection of SOAP and REST services.…”

“…These anti-patterns affect the quality of service and can hinder maintenance and evolution. It reflects from state of the art anti-pattern detection techniques that mostly the concentration was on the static analysis of Web-services or on anti-patterns in other Service Oriented Architecture technologies (e.g., Service Component Architecture) [9].…”

“…Most state of the art techniques focused on detection of anti-patterns from object oriented software applications but these techniques are not capable of detecting anti-patterns from SOA. We identified only a few representative approaches on specification and detection of SOA anti-patterns from Web-services [9,12,13,14,15,16,18]. To the best of our knowledge, most authors used different metrics and static/ dynamic analysis methods for the detection of anti-patterns from web-services.…”

A service-based framework for the OAIS model for earth science data management

“…The need to adapt SOA-based repositories to accommodate new conditions represents engineering challenges for software developers (Palma et al 2013). Keeping the various services of the system functioning and interoperating smoothly can be another challenge.…”