Cohesion-Driven Decomposition of Service Interfaces without Access to Source Code

Abstract

Abstract-Software cohesion concerns the degree to which the elements of a module belong together. Cohesive software is easier to understand, test and maintain. Improving cohesion is the target of several refactoring methods that have been proposed until now. These methods are tailored to operate by taking the source code into consideration. In the context of service-oriented development, cohesion refers to the degree to which the operations of a service interface belong together. In this context, we propose an approach for the cohesion-driven decomposition of service interfaces. The very philosophy of services dictates that all that is exported by a service is the service specification. Hence, our approach for the cohesion-driven decomposition of service interfaces is not based on how the services are implemented. Instead, it relies only on information provided in the specification of the service interfaces. We validate the approach in 22 real-world services provided by Amazon and Yahoo. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, concerning the cohesion improvement and the size of the produced decompositions. Moreover, we show that the proposed approach is useful, by conducting a user study, where developers assessed the quality of the produced decompositions.

Interactive Refactoring of Web Service Interfaces Using Computational Search

“…Recently, few studies have proposed to restructure the design of the Web services interface [4] [5]. We can distinguish two main categories: manual and fully-automated techniques.…”

“…We evaluated our approach on a set of 22 real-world Web services, provided by Amazon and Yahoo. Statistical analysis of our experiments shows that our dynamic interactive Web services interface modularization approach performed significantly better than the state-of-the-art modularization techniques [4] [5]. The primary contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows: 1.…”

“…Despite its importance, very few studies focused on improving the design of Web service interfaces for the users/subscribers [4] [5]. The majority of existing work [3][4] [5] [6] [7] addressed the problem of the detection of design antipatterns of Web services interface based on declarative rule specification.…”

“…Recent work [4] [5] addressed the problem of fixing these design antipatterns by automatically decomposing Web services interface based only on the cohesion metric. Indeed, deciding on how to decompose/modularize an interface is subjective and difficult to automate since it is required to integrate the feedback of users during the modularization process.…”

“…Most of existing real-world Web services interface regroup together a high number operations implementing different abstractions such as the Amazon EC2 that contains more than 100 operations in some releases. There are few WSDL design improvement tools [4][5] that have emerged to provide basic refactorings on WSDL files however applying these refactorings is fully manual and time consuming as discussed in the next section. These interface design refactorings correspond to Interface Decomposition, Interface Merging (to merge multiple interfaces) and Move Operation (to move an operation between different interfaces).…”