Applied Statistics for Engineers and Scientists

As the technology associated to the ?Web Services? trend gains significant adoption, the need for a corresponding design approach becomes increasingly important. This paper introduces a foundational model for designing (composite) services. The innovation of this model lies in the identification of four interrelated viewpoints (interface behaviour, provider behaviour, choreography, and orchestration) and their formalization from a control-flow perspective in terms of Petri nets. By formally capturing the interrelationships between these viewpoints, the proposal enables the static verification of the consistency of composite services designed in a cooperative and incremental manner. A proof-of-concept simulation and verification tool has been developed to test the possibilities of the proposed model.

Service-oriented Design : A Multi-viewpoint Approach

https://zenodo.org/record/1997449/files/SS18.pdf

A survey on software smells

A development framework for semantically interoperable health information systems.

Recent empirical studies have investigated the use of source code metrics to predict the change- and defect-proneness of source code files and classes. While results showed strong correlations and good predictive power of these metrics, they do not distinguish between interface, abstract or concrete classes. In particular, interfaces declare contracts that are meant to remain stable during the evolution of a software system while the implementation in concrete classes is more likely to change. This paper aims at investigating to which extent the existing source code metrics can be used for predicting change-prone Java interfaces. We empirically investigate the correlation between metrics and the number of fine-grained source code changes in interfaces of ten Java open-source systems. Then, we evaluate the metrics to calculate models for predicting change-prone Java interfaces. Our results show that the external interface cohesion metric exhibits the strongest correlation with the number of source code changes. This metric also improves the performance of prediction models to classify Java interfaces into change-prone and not change-prone.

/pdf/using-source-code-metrics-to-predict-change-prone-java-mxjw007g2p.pdf

Using source code metrics to predict change-prone Java interfaces

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is emerging as a promising paradigm for developing distributed enterprise applications. Although some initial concepts of SOC have been investigated in the research literature, and related technologies are in the process of adoption by an increasing number of enterprises, the ability to measure the structural attributes of service-oriented designs thus predicting the quality of the final software product does not currently exist. Therefore, this paper proposes a set of metrics for quantifying the structural coupling of design artefacts in service-oriented systems. The metrics, which are validated against previously established properties of coupling, are intended to predict the quality characteristic of maintainability of service-oriented software. This is expected to benefit both research and industrial communities as existing object-oriented and procedural metrics are not readily applicable to the implementation of service-oriented systems.

Coupling Metrics for Predicting Maintainability in Service-Oriented Designs

Although service-oriented computing (SOC) is a promising paradigm for developing enterprise software systems, existing research mostly assumes the existence of black box services with little attention given to the structural characteristics of the implementing software, potentially resulting in poor system maintainability. Whilst there has been some preliminary work examining coupling in a service-oriented context, there has to date been no such work on the structural property of cohesion. Consequently, this paper extends existing notions of cohesion in OO and procedural design in order to account for the unique characteristics of SOC, allowing the derivation of assumptions linking cohesion to the maintainability of service-oriented software. From these assumptions, a set of metrics are derived to quantify the degree of cohesion of service oriented design constructs. Such design level metrics are valuable because they allow the prediction of maintainability early in the SDLC.

Cohesion Metrics for Predicting Maintainability of Service-Oriented Software

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is intended to improve software maintainability as businesses become more agile and underlying processes and rules change more frequently. However, to date, the impact of service cohesion on the analyzability subcharacteristic of maintainability has not been rigorously studied. Consequently, this paper extends existing notions of cohesion in the Procedural and OO paradigms in order to account for the unique characteristics of SOC, thereby supporting the derivation of design-level software metrics for objectively quantifying the degree of service cohesion. The metrics are theoretically validated, and an initial empirical evaluation using a small-scale controlled study suggests that the proposed metrics could help predict analyzability early in the Software Development Life Cycle. If future industrial studies confirm these findings, the practical applicability of such metrics is to support the development of service-oriented systems that can be analyzed, and thus maintained, more easily. In addition, such metrics could help identify design problems in existing systems.

The Impact of Service Cohesion on the Analyzability of Service-Oriented Software

One of the goals of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is to improve software maintainability as businesses become more agile, and thus underlying processes and rules change more frequently. This paper presents a controlled experiment examining the relationship between coupling in service-oriented designs, as measured using a recently proposed suite of SOC-specific coupling metrics and software maintainability in terms of the specific subcharacteristics of analyzability, changeability, and stability. The results indicate a statistically significant causal relationship between the investigated coupling metrics and the maintainability of service-oriented software. As such, the investigated metrics can facilitate coupling related design decisions with the aim of producing more maintainable service-oriented software products.

/pdf/a-controlled-experiment-for-evaluating-the-impact-of-4b5ttzpfxa.pdf

A Controlled Experiment for Evaluating the Impact of Coupling on the Maintainability of Service-Oriented Software

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is emerging as a promising software development paradigm based on the concept of encapsulating application logic within independent, loosely coupled, stateless services that interact via messages using standard communication protocols The design principles of SOC are yet to be well understood; therefore service-oriented systems are often developed in an ad-hoc fashion, with little support for validating the quality of the service-oriented (SO) design upon which such systems are based As such, there is a need for mechanisms supporting the measurement of internal structural quality attributes of SO designs (such as coupling and cohesion) in order to predict and enhance the quality of the final product.

Mikhail Perepletchikov

Papers

Coupling Metrics for Predicting Maintainability in Service-Oriented Designs

Cohesion Metrics for Predicting Maintainability of Service-Oriented Software

The Impact of Service Cohesion on the Analyzability of Service-Oriented Software

A Controlled Experiment for Evaluating the Impact of Coupling on the Maintainability of Service-Oriented Software

Towards the definition and validation of coupling metrics for predicting maintainability in service-oriented designs