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Portability of executable service-oriented processes: metrics and validation

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Abstract

A key promise of process languages based on open standards, such as the Web Services Business Process Execution Language, is the avoidance of vendor lock-in through the portability of processes among runtime environments. Despite the fact that today various runtimes claim to support this language, every runtime implements a different subset, thus hampering portability and locking in their users. It is our intention to improve this situation by enabling the measurement of the portability of executable service-oriented processes. This helps developers to assess their implementations and to decide if it is feasible to invest in the effort of porting a process to another runtime. In this paper, we define several software quality metrics that quantify the degree of portability of an executable, service-oriented process from different viewpoints. When integrated into a development environment, such metrics can help to improve the portability of the outcome. We validate the metrics theoretically with respect to measurement theory and construct validity using two validation frameworks. The validation is complemented with an empirical evaluation of the metrics using a large set of processes coming from several process libraries.

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Notes

  1. Betsy is a conformance testing tool for BPEL. For more information, see the project page: https://github.com/uniba-dsg/betsy.

  2. See the project page http://uniba-dsg.github.io/prope/ for more information and a description on how to use the static checker. A plugin implementation for the Sonarqube quality management platform is also available at http://uniba-dsg.github.io/sonar-prope-plugin/.

  3. For the remainder of the paper, we round all metric values to two decimal places.

  4. We deviate slightly from the specification, by also considering event processing activities like, e.g., onEvent and onAlarm, as normal activities. In the specification, these are not listed as separate activities, but as part of the pick activity. Since they are almost identical to other activities, receive and wait, we think a separate consideration is worthwhile.

  5. The network recently (July 2014) changed its name from Ohloh to Open Hub. For more information, see the network homepage located at https://www.openhub.net/.

  6. All statistical computations in this section were performed using the R software [56].

  7. Since we drop the assumption of normality in the following, we omit a presentation of the results of this test.

  8. The homepage of the Mono project is available at http://www.mono-project.com.

  9. ISO/IEC CD 25023 [29] is intended to revise the preceding ISO/IEC standards that define quality metrics, ISO/IEC TR 9126-2:2003 [26] and ISO/IEC TR 9126-3:2003 [27]. At the time of writing, [29] is still under development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Karlstad University, 65188, Karlstad, Sweden

    Jörg Lenhard

  2. Distributed Systems Group, University of Bamberg, 96045, Bamberg, Germany

    Guido Wirtz

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  1. Jörg Lenhard
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Correspondence to Jörg Lenhard.

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Lenhard, J., Wirtz, G. Portability of executable service-oriented processes: metrics and validation. SOCA 10, 391–411 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-016-0195-4

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