Analyzing the Impact of External and Internal Cohesion on the Change-Proneness of Web APIs
Daniele Romano, Maria Kalouda, Martin Pinzger · 2013
Several metrics have been proposed in literature to highlight change-prone software components in order to ease their maintainability. However, to the best of our knowledge, no such studies exist for web APIs (i.e., APIs exposed and accessible via networks) whose popularity has grown considerably over the last years. Web APIs are considered contracts between providers and consumers and stability is a key quality attribute of them. We present a qualitative and quantitative study of the change-proneness of web APIs with low external and internal cohesion. First, we report on an online survey to investigate the maintenance scenarios that cause changes to web APIs. Then, we define an internal cohesion metric and analyze its correlation with the changes performed in ten well known WSDL APIs. Our results provide several insights into the interface, method, and data-type change-proneness of web APIs with low internal and external cohesion. The results assist both providers and consumers in assessing the stability of web APIs, and provide directions for future research.