Controlling complexity of web services interfaces through a metrics-driven approach

Metric suites to assess Web Service quality attributes have been proposed recently. In particular, services interfaces in WSDL (Web Service Description Language) have distinct intrinsic aspects (e.g., size or complexity) able to be measured. We present an approach to prevent a high complexity on services interfaces (WSDLs), to ease consumers to reason about services' offered functionality. Mostly, WSDLs are automatically derived from object-oriented (OO) source code, with a likely impact on complexity. In a previous work, we studied the statistical relationships between a metric suite of service interface complexity (by Baski & Misra) and the Chidamber & Kemerer's OO metric suite (onto service implementations). In this work, we extend the study to find out how certain refactorings on services' source codes prior to derive WSDLs might reduce complexity. For this, we conducted a series of experiments on a data-set of 148 real-world services. In this way, our approach exploits OO metrics as indicators at development-time, guiding software developers to achieve less complex service interfaces.