Evaluation of quality of design for document-centric software services

Abstract

As the size and complexity of service oriented applications increases ensuring the quality of design of services that constitute these applications is becoming critical. Poor design of services results in unnecessarily complex and inflexible applications that are difficult to maintain and evolve. Service design has been the subject of intense research interest for almost a decade and there is a wide agreement about the key service design principles that promote maintainability of software services. Recent research efforts include attempts to develop reliable metrics for assessing design quality of service-oriented applications. Most of these metrics were adapted from metrics for object-oriented software and focus on measuring intra-service cohesion and interservice coupling. In this paper we argue that such metrics are of limited use in assessing the quality of coarse-grained document-centric services used in majority of SOA applications and propose a Message Data Coupling Index (MDCI) - a metric that evaluates orthogonality of a family of XML schemas based on the level of data coupling. We describe the implementation of a prototype tool that computes several variants of the MDCI metric. © Springer-Verlag 2013.