A metric for measuring the degree of entity-centric service cohesion

Most of the focus in business process modeling (BPM) is on activity-centric; however an emerging approach in the field is entity-centric which benefits from various enhancements in contrast to former approaches. As a consequence, entity-centric business services as the external view of a group of business processes within an organization are getting more importance in contrast to the other types of business services. These types of services are more powerful than task-centric services in terms of being more reusable, and needing less effort to redesign and redevelop when satisfying new requirements. Therefore, it is critical to quantitatively measure structural properties of such services. Since entity-centric design approaches are emerging in service-oriented paradigm, there is no comprehensive metric to measure the degree of service cohesion. This paper aims to address this issue by providing a novel cohesion metric that takes into account the relations between the entities used by shared operations. The metric are empirically evaluated in a small-scaled controlled study.