A metric for functional reusability of services

Abstract

Services are self-contained software components that can be used platform independent and that aim at maximizing software reuse. A basic concern in service oriented architectures is to measure the reusability of services. One of the most important qualities is the functional reusability, which indicates how relevant the task is that a service solves. Current metrics for functional reusability of software, however, have very little explanatory power and do not accomplish this goal. This paper presents a new approach to estimate the functional reusability of services based on their relevance. To this end, it defines the degree to which a service enables the execution of other services as its contribution. Based on the contribution, relevance of services is defined as an estimation for their functional reusability. Explanatory power is obtained by normalizing relevance values with a reference service. The application of the metric to a service test set confirms its supposed capabilities.