Using Metric Time-Lines for Identifying Architecture Shortcomings in Process Execution Architectures

Process Execution with Service Orchestrations is an emerging architectural style for developing business software systems. However, few special metrics for guiding software architecture decisions have been proposed and no existing business process metrics have been evaluated for their suitability. By following static code metrics over time, architects can gain a better understanding, how processes and the whole system evolve and whether the metrics evolve as expected. This allows architects to recogniize when to intervene in the development and make architecture adjustments or refactorings. This paper presents an explatory study that uses time-lines of static process size metrics for constant feedback to software architects that deal with process-oriented architectures.