Simple metric for assessing quality of service design

Abstract

Service design has been the subject of intense research interest and there is a wide agreement about the key principles that lead to good quality design of services. However, there is evidence that achieving good quality design of services in practice is difficult and that many service oriented applications suffer from low levels of reuse and are difficult to evolve. Recent research efforts include attempts to develop reliable metrics for assessing design quality of service oriented applications. In this paper we argue that poor reuse of services can be largely attributed to coarse-granularity document-centric services that are used extensively by SOA practitioners. We briefly discuss reusability in the context of domain-specific service-oriented applications and propose a simple design metric that estimates the level of data coupling between services based on orthogonality of interface data structures. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.