Title
Collecting Service-Based Maintainability Metrics from RESTful API Descriptions: Static Analysis and Threshold Derivation
Abstract
While many maintainability metrics have been explicitly designed for service-based systems, tool-supported approaches to automatically collect these metrics are lacking. Especially in the context of microservices, decentralization and technological heterogeneity may pose challenges for static analysis. We therefore propose the modular and extensible RAMA approach (RESTful API Metric Analyzer) to calculate such metrics from machine-readable interface descriptions of RESTful services. We also provide prototypical tool support, the RAMA CLI, which currently parses the formats OpenAPI, RAML, and WADL and calculates 10 structural service-based metrics proposed in scientific literature. To make RAMA measurement results more actionable, we additionally designed a repeatable benchmark for quartile-based threshold ranges (green, yellow, orange, red). In an exemplary run, we derived thresholds for all RAMA CLI metrics from the interface descriptions of 1,737 publicly available RESTful APIs. Researchers and practitioners can use RAMA to evaluate the maintainability of RESTful services or to support the empirical evaluation of new service interface metrics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1007/978-3-030-59155-7_16
ECSA Companion
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Justus Bogner100.34
Stefan Wagner210929.08
Alfred Zimmermann32612.90