An Evaluation on Developer's Perception of XML Schema Complexity Metrics for Web Services

Abstract

Undoubtedly, the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is not an incipient computing paradigm anymore, while Web Services technologies is now a very mature stack of technologies. Both have been steadily gaining maturity as their adoption in the software industry grew. Accordingly, several metric suites for assessing different quality attributes of Web Services have been recently proposed. In particular, researchers have focused on measuring services interfaces descriptions, which like any other software artifact, have a measurable size, complexity and quality. This paper presents a study that assesses human perception of some recent services interfaces complexity metrics (Basci and Misra's metrics suite). Empirical evidence suggests that a service interface that it is not complex for a software application, in terms of time and space required to analyze it, will not be necessarily well designed, in terms of best practices for designing Web Services. A Likert-based questionnaire was used to gather individuals opinions about this topic.