Apostolos Zarras, Panos Vassiliadis, Ioannis Dinos
28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2016). 13-17 June 2016, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Web services are black box dependency magnets. Hence, studying how
they evolve is both important and challenging. In this paper, we focus
on one of the most successful stories of the service-oriented paradigm
in industry, i.e., the Amazon services. We perform a principled
empirical study, that detects evolution patterns and regularities,
based on Lehman's laws of software evolution.
Our findings indicate that service evolution comes with spikes of
change, followed by calm periods where the service is internally
enhanced. Although spikes come with unpredictable volume, developers
can count in the near certainty of the calm periods following them to
allow their absorption. As deletions rarely occur, both the complexity
and the exported functionality of a service increase over time (in
fact, predictably). Based on the above findings, we provide
recommendations that can be used by the developers of Web service
applications for service selection and application maintenance.
[Local copy of the CAiSE 2016 paper(PDF)]
[Long version of the CAiSE 2016 paper(PDF)]
2016 presentation (PPTX) (PDF)