A Controlled Experiment for Evaluating the Impact of Coupling on the Maintainability of Service-Oriented Software

One of the goals of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is to improve software maintainability as businesses become more agile, and thus underlying processes and rules change more frequently. This paper presents a controlled experiment examining the relationship between coupling in service-oriented designs, as measured using a recently proposed suite of SOC-specific coupling metrics and software maintainability in terms of the specific subcharacteristics of analyzability, changeability, and stability. The results indicate a statistically significant causal relationship between the investigated coupling metrics and the maintainability of service-oriented software. As such, the investigated metrics can facilitate coupling related design decisions with the aim of producing more maintainable service-oriented software products.