A Control-Flow Complexity Measure of Web Service Composition Process

The complexity of Web services composition process is intuitively relevant to the effects such as readability, testability, reliability, and maintainability. Analyzing the complexity at all stages of process design and development helps avoid the drawbacks associated with high-complexity processes. In this paper, we present a control-flow complexity measure of the structured process of Web service composition. The measure is defined based on a data structure named Structure Tree. By the complexity computing algorithm based on Structure Tree, we can get complexity of a process and its substructures simultaneously. The characteristics of different structure types and the nesting level are taken into consideration in the complexity measure. Since Weyuker´s properties are a widely known formal analytical approach of complexity metric, we evaluate our measure in terms of these properties in order to guarantee its effectiveness.