Paper Info
Title
Cohesion-Driven Decomposition of Service Interfaces Without Access to Source Code
Abstract
Software cohesion concerns the degree to which the elements of a module belong together. Cohesive software is easier to understand, test and maintain. In the context of service-oriented development, cohesion refers to the degree to which the operations of a service interface belong together. In the state of the art, software cohesion is improved based on refactoring methods that rely on information, extracted from the software implementation. This is a main limitation towards using these methods in the case of Web services: Web services do not expose their implementation; instead all that they export is the Web service interface specification. To deal with this problem, we propose an approach that enables the cohesiondriven decomposition of service interfaces, without information on how the services are implemented. Our approach progressive decomposes a given service interface into more cohesive interfaces; the backbone of the approach is a suite of cohesion metrics that rely on information, extracted solely from the specification of the service interface. We validate the approach in 22 real-world services, provided by Amazon and Yahoo. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach, concerning the cohesion improvement, and the number of interfaces that result from the decomposition of the examined interfaces. Moreover, we show the usefulness of the approach in a user study, where developers assessed the quality of the produced interfaces.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/TSC.2014.2310195
IEEE Trans. Services Computing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Cohesion, decomposition, service interface
Journal
PP
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
99
1939-1374
10
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.54
17
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dionysis Athanasopoulos1475.19
Apostolos Zarras229330.20
George Miskos3100.54
valerie issarny450234.88
Panos Vassiliadis51821134.74