Metrics for evaluating the quality of service-oriented design

Service-orientation is a modern approach in building software systems and it has been applied successfully to develop of many domains of software systems. The service-oriented design is the key phase, and assessing the quality at this level is very essential to reduce the cost and effort of the implementation phase and enhance the quality of software applications. In order to assess the quality of service-oriented design many metrics are proposed in the literature but these metrics are constructed based on the characteristic of the previous development approaches such as object-oriented and they do not consider the service that is built from other services. Furthermore, these metrics do not consider the indirect relationships between service-oriented elements. However, a comprehensive quality measurement for service-oriented design is still lacking. A set of metrics is proposed during this study as part of an attempt to evaluate the coupling, cohesion and complexity of service-oriented design and theoretically validated. Moreover, this work can be used as a first step to propose a comprehensive quality measurement model for service-oriented design.