Managing Web Service Interface Complexity via an OO Metric-based Early Approach

Abstract

Web Services have been steadily gaining maturity as their adoption in the software industry grew. Accordingly, metric suites for assessing different quality attributes of Web Service artifacts have been proposed recently. Some researchers have particularly focused on assessing service interface descriptions in WSDL, which like any other software artifact have several inherent attributes (e.g., size or complexity) that can be measured. We study the statistical relationships between some recent service interface complexity metrics (Basci & Misra´s metrics suite) and the well-known Chidamber & Kemerer´s metric suite applied to service implementations, on a data-set of 154 real-world services. First, to prove the ability of Basci & Misra´s suite of measuring the complexity attribute in WSDL documents, a theoretical validation of these metrics using Weyuker´s properties is presented. Then, after finding high correlation between both metric suites, we show that refactoring service codes prior to generating the WSDL documents might reduce service interface complexity.