Measuring the Portability of Executable Service-Oriented Processes

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 process definitions 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. In this paper, we intend to improve this situation by enabling the measurement of the degree of portability of process definitions. This helps developers to assess their process definitions and to decide if it is feasible to invest in the effort of porting a process definition to another runtime. We define several software quality metrics that quantify the degree of portability a process definition provides from different viewpoints. We validate these metrics theoretically with two validation frameworks and empirically with a large set of process definitions coming from several process libraries.