A CONCEPTUAL COHESION METRIC FOR SERVICE ORIENTED SYSTEMS
Keywords:
Software Metrics, Service Conceptual Cohesion, Service-Oriented Design Principle, Latent Semantic IndexingAbstract
Service conceptual cohesion has an incredible impact on the reusability and maintainability of serviceoriented software systems. Conceptual cohesion indicates the degree of focus of services on a single business functionality. Current metrics for measuring service cohesion reflect the structural aspect of cohesion and therefore cannot be utilized to measure conceptual cohesion of services. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), on the other hand, is an information retrieval technique widely used to measure the degree of similarity between a set of text based documents. In our previous work, a metric, namely SCD (Service Cohesion Degree), has been proposed that measures conceptual cohesion of services based on the LSI technique. SCD provides a quantitative evaluation to measure how much a service concentrates on a single business functionality. In addition, SCD is applied in the service identification step, i.e., when services are not yet available, and the designer plans for developing services with high cohesion. This paper has two contributions in comparison to our previous work. At first, it resolves two anomalies occurring in our previous method when calculating conceptual relationship between service operations. Secondly, as the main contribution of the paper, it presents details of a theoretical validation and an empirical evaluation of SCD. By using a small-scale controlled study, the empirical evaluation demonstrates that SCD could measure conceptual cohesion of services acceptably.
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