A metric for measuring BPEL process context-independency

BPEL provides a workflow-oriented composition model for service-oriented solutions that facilitates the system integration through orchestration and choreography of services. In some cases, BPEL process designs can be highly complex owing to the vast number of services executed in global markets. Such heavy coupling and context dependency with partners in one side and the complicated structure of the processes on the other side, provoke several undesirable drawbacks such as poor understandability, inflexibility, inadaptability, and defects. Therefore, heavy context dependency should be avoided. This paper proposes a quantitative metric to measure BPEL process context-independency which lead SOA architect determines to the extent that a BPEL process is context-independent.