A study on the taxonomy of service antipatterns

Antipatterns in Service-based Systems (SBSs)— service antipatterns—represent "bad" solutions to recurring design problems. In opposition to design patterns, which are good solutions, antipatterns should be avoided by the engineers. Antipatterns may also be introduced due to diverse changes performed against new user requirements and execution contexts. Service antipatterns may degrade the quality of design and may hinder the future maintenance and evolution of SBSs. The detection of service antipatterns is important to improve the design quality of SBSs and to ease their maintenance. A better understanding of service antipatterns is a must prerequisite to perform their detection. This paper presents a taxonomy of service antipatterns in Web services and SCA (Service Component Architecture), the two common SBSs implementation technologies. The presented taxonomy will facilitate engineers their understanding on service antipatterns. Other substantial benefits of the presented taxonomy include: (1) assisting in the specification and detection of service antipatterns, (2) revealing the relationships among various groups of service antipatterns, (3) grouping together antipatterns that are fundamentally related, and (4) providing an overview of various system-level design problems ensemble.