Measuring Change Impact Based on Usage Profiles

Service evolution is a critical issue because even small changes, if not compatible, can potentially affect a huge number of client applications. However, particularly in the context of large scale service usage, changes have different impact on clients according to its use. This paper proposes a change management framework that supports service providers to scope and quantify the impact of changes based on usage analysis. The framework adopts a finer-grained versioning model in order to easily locate and assess the compatibility of changes in service descriptions. The framework also clusters client applications based on similar patterns of usage, summarizing them in usage profiles. A usage profile quantifies the functionality of the service used by the corresponding applications, enabling to assess the impact of incompatible changes against the profile.