Towards facilitating development of SOA application with design metrics

Abstract

Applications based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) are intended to be built with both high cohesion and low coupling. The loosely coupled services bring forth the lower costs of development and maintenance as well as the higher reusability and extensibility. To implement each SOA application with such intention, designs play an important role for the success of the whole project. The services and the relationships among them represented in a design are two critical factors to decide the quality of an SOA application in terms of modularity. At the mean while, they are valuable indicators for guiding the following development and maintenance phases to progress in a cost-effective way. In this paper, we present that measurement of designs for SOA applications can objectively judge the quality and further facilitate the development and maintenance of SOA applications through employing two specific metrics. We also performed an experimental study on an ongoing SOA project. In this study, we applied these two metrics to the design of this project to acquire judgments and make estimations. The data in CVS were retrieved to reflect the genuine project situations. The analysis on these data shows that adopting the measurement in the early stage of SOA projects may avoid wasting efforts and delaying schedule as well as acquire a deep grasp and an effective control on the issues in the following phases. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.