link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106313
Understanding how your product performs in the field is a very hot topic. To be honest, it’s always been. When we design and develop our product, we often want to know whether the outcome is going to be good or not. Well, this is not an easy task because we cannot really know to runtime properties of our products before very close to the final version. It’s difficult to measure end-to-end response time if we only have half of the database, or if we cannot simulate the full load of the product.
In this paper, the authors analysed over 700 web services and measured their code quality and interface quality as predictors for the quality of service.
From the abstract: source code and interface quality metrics/antipatterns are correlated with web service quality attributes (response time, availability, throughput, successability, reliability, compliance, best practices, latency, and documentation).
The internal code/interface quality measures were:
- NPT: Number of port types, Interface
- NOPT: Average number of operations in port types, Interface
- NBS: Number of services, Interface
- NIPT: Number of identical port types, Interface
- NIOP: Number of identical operations, Interface
- ALPS: Average length of port-types signature, Interface
- AMTO: Average meaningful terms in operation names, Interface
- AMTM: Average meaningful terms in message names, Interface
- AMTMP: Average meaningful terms in message parts, Interface
- AMTP: Average meaningful terms in port-type names, Interface
- NOD: Number of operations declared, Code
- NAOD: Number of accessor operations declared, Code
- ANIPO: Average number of input parameters in operations, Code
- ANOPO: Average number of output parameters in operations, Code
- NOM: Number of messages, Code
- NBE: Number of elements of the schemas, Code
- NCT: Number of complex types, Code
- NST: Number of primitive types, Code
- NBB: Number of bindings, Code
- NPM: Number of parts per message, Code
- COH Cohesion: The degree of the functional relatedness of the operations of the service, Code
- COU Coupling: A measure of the extent to which inter-dependencies exist between the service modules, Code
- ALOS: Average length of operations signature, Code
- ALMS: Average length of message signature, Code
This is quite a collection of measures and they are quite interesting, e.g. the average meaningful terms in port-type names. I must admit that it’s a new measure that I’ve not seen before.
The measures of the quality of service were:
- Response Time: Time taken to send a request and receive a response, QoS
- Availability: How often is the service available for consumption, QoS
- Throughput: Total Number of invocations for a given period of time, QoS
- Successability: Number of response / number of request messages, QoS
- Reliability: Ratio of the number of error messages to total messages, QoS
- Compliance: The extent to which a WSDL document follows WSDL specification, QoS
- Best Practices: The extent to which a web service follows WS-I Basic Profile, QoS
- Latency: Time taken for the server to process a given request, QoS
- Documentation: Measure of documentation (i.e. description tags) in WSDL, QoS
Some of these are also quite interesting, e.g. Successability, which is the number of response messages per request messages.
The authors also measured some anti patterns of service design, which they list in the paper. I will not go through these anti-patterns, but I think that they are also correlated with some of the metrics.
I suggest this reading to everyone interested in web services and service design. Perhaps this could help us to get more high-performance services. I hope that I can see more of this type of research in the domain of service security – that’s an interesting area in itself.
