Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

On the State of the Art of Coupling and Cohesion Measures for Service-Oriented System Design

Service-oriented computing has encountered an increasing importance for enterprises over the last years. With Web services, the major underlying technical basis is already in an advanced state. The service design area, on the other hand, still provides several research gaps such as the field of service identification and in particular the determination of an optimal granularity level for services. Granularity, assessed through coupling and cohesion considerations, is yet a rather unexplored domain when it comes to service-orientation, although several results from earlier design principles are available. In this paper we summarize the current state of the art in granularity measures and identify the implications emerging for practice and re-search. As we reveal, several existing measures for other paradigms, which might be adapted for service-orientation, are left unconsidered. Further research gaps, as the mainly missing empirical evaluation or a tighter inclusion in the development process, are also detected

A survey on software coupling relations and tools

Context Coupling relations reflect the dependencies between software entities and can be used to assess the quality of a program. For this reason, a vast amount of them has been developed, together with tools to compute their related metrics. However, this makes the coupling measures suitable for a given application challenging to find. Goals The first objective of this work is to provide a classification of the different kinds of coupling relations, together with the metrics to measure them. The second consists in presenting an overview of the tools proposed until now by the software engineering academic community to extract these metrics. Method This work constitutes a systematic literature review in software engineering. To retrieve the referenced publications, publicly available scientific research databases were used. These sources were queried using keywords inherent to software coupling. We included publications from the period 2002 to 2017 and highly cited earlier publications. A snowballing technique was used to retrieve further related material. Results Four groups of coupling relations were found: structural, dynamic, semantic and logical. A fifth set of coupling relations includes approaches too recent to be considered an independent group and measures developed for specific environments. The investigation also retrieved tools that extract the metrics belonging to each coupling group. Conclusion This study shows the directions followed by the research on software coupling: e.g., developing metrics for specific environments. Concerning the metric tools, three trends have emerged in recent years: use of visualization techniques, extensibility and scalability. Finally, some coupling metrics applications were presented (e.g., code smell detection), indicating possible future research directions. Public preprint [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2002001]

Pemetaan Secara Sistematis Pada Metrik Kualitas Perangkat Lunak

. Software quality assurance is one method to increase quality of software. Improvement of software quality can be measured with software quality metric. Software quality metrics are part of software quality measurement model. Currently software quality models have a very diverse types, so that software quality metrics become increasingly diverse. The various types of metrics to measure the quality of software create proper metrics selection issues to fit the desired quality measurement parameters. Another problem is the validation need to be performed on these metrics in order to obtain objective and valid results. In this paper, a systematic mapping of the software quality metric is conducted in the last nine years. This paper brings up issues in software quality metrics that can be used by other researchers. Furthermore, current trends are introduced and discussed

A research review of quality assessment for software

Measures were recommended to assess the quality of software submitted to the AdaNet program. The quality factors that are important to software reuse are explored and methods of evaluating those factors are discussed. Quality factors important to software reuse are: correctness, reliability, verifiability, understandability, modifiability, and certifiability. Certifiability is included because the documentation of many factors about a software component such as its efficiency, portability, and development history, constitute a class for factors important to some users, not important at all to other, and impossible for AdaNet to distinguish between a priori. The quality factors may be assessed in different ways. There are a few quantitative measures which have been shown to indicate software quality. However, it is believed that there exists many factors that indicate quality and have not been empirically validated due to their subjective nature. These subjective factors are characterized by the way in which they support the software engineering principles of abstraction, information hiding, modularity, localization, confirmability, uniformity, and completeness

A COUPLING AND COHESION METRICS SUITE FOR

The increasing need for software quality measurements has led to extensive research into software metrics and the development of software metric tools. To maintain high quality software, developers need to strive for a low-coupled and highly cohesive design. One of many properties considered when measuring coupling and cohesion is the type of relationships that made up coupling and cohesion. What these specific relationships are is widely understood and accepted by researchers and practitioners. However, different researchers base their metrics on a different subset of these relationships. Studies have shown that because of the inclusion of multiple subsets of relationships in one measure of coupling and cohesion metrics, the measures tend to correlate among each other. Validation of these metrics against maintainability index of a Java program suggested that there is high multicollinearity among coupling and cohesion metrics. This research introduces an approach of implementing coupling and cohesion metrics. Every possible relationship is considered and, for each, addressed the issue of whether or not it has significant effect on maintainability index prediction. Validation of orthogonality of the selected metrics is assessed by means of principal component analysis. The investigation suggested that some of the metrics are independent set of metrics, while some are measuring similar dimension

Expert Elicitation for Reliable System Design

This paper reviews the role of expert judgement to support reliability assessments within the systems engineering design process. Generic design processes are described to give the context and a discussion is given about the nature of the reliability assessments required in the different systems engineering phases. It is argued that, as far as meeting reliability requirements is concerned, the whole design process is more akin to a statistical control process than to a straightforward statistical problem of assessing an unknown distribution. This leads to features of the expert judgement problem in the design context which are substantially different from those seen, for example, in risk assessment. In particular, the role of experts in problem structuring and in developing failure mitigation options is much more prominent, and there is a need to take into account the reliability potential for future mitigation measures downstream in the system life cycle. An overview is given of the stakeholders typically involved in large scale systems engineering design projects, and this is used to argue the need for methods that expose potential judgemental biases in order to generate analyses that can be said to provide rational consensus about uncertainties. Finally, a number of key points are developed with the aim of moving toward a framework that provides a holistic method for tracking reliability assessment through the design process.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0285], [arXiv:0708.0287], [arXiv:0708.0288]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0293]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000510 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Software product quality metrics : a systematic mapping study

In the current competitive world, producing quality products has become a prominent factor to succeed in business. In this respect, defining and following the software product quality metrics (SPQM) to detect the current quality situation and continuous improvement of systems have gained tremendous importance. Therefore, it is necessary to review the present studies in this area to allow for the analysis of the situation at hand, as well as to enable us to make predictions regarding the future research areas. The present research aims to analyze the active research areas and trends on this topic appearing in the literature during the last decade. A Systematic Mapping (SM) study was carried out on 70 articles and conference papers published between 2009 and 2019 on SPQM as indicated in their titles and abstract. The result is presented through graphics, explanations, and the mind mapping method. The outputs include the trend map between the years 2009 and 2019, knowledge about this area and measurement tools, issues determined to be open to development in this area, and conformity between conference papers, articles and internationally valid quality models. This study may serve as a foundation for future studies that aim to contribute to the development in this crucial field. Future SM studies might focus on this subject for measuring the quality of network performance and new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), Cloud of Things (CoT), Machine Learning, and Robotics.publishedVersio