Decoding and Answering Developers' Questions About Web Services Managed by Marketplaces
Siddhi Baravkar, Chi Zhang, Foyzul Hassan, Long Cheng, Zheng Song · 2024
Service registry, a key component of the service-oriented architecture (SOA), aids software developers in discovering services that meet specific functionality requirements. Recent years have witnessed the transition from the traditional service registries to its successor, the Service Marketplaces, which involves deeper engagement in the SOA software lifecycle and offers additional features, such as service request delegation and monitoring of services' Quality of Service (QoS). However, by analyzing developers' questions posted on online Q&A forums, we found that many developers struggle with such transition, leading to development inefficiencies and even security vulnera-bilities. This paper presents the first empirical study aimed at uncovering the issues developers face with marketplaces, particularly those arising from the transition. Through a meticulous process of manually labeling and analyzing developers' questions, we develop a taxonomy of these issues, summarize the impacts caused by the transition, and provide actionable suggestions to App developers, service providers, and marketplaces. Utilizing the labeled questions and our insights, we fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM) for providing answers to similar questions raised by developers and helping service providers and marketplaces extract useful information from these questions, such as service outages and key leakages. Our evaluation of the model's performance in answering and extracting pertinent information from a set of real-world questions demonstrates its effectiveness: it accurately classified 85 % of the queries and successfully identified 88 % of service names and 77 % of key leakages. As the first empirical study in this domain, this work not only aids developers in navigating the transition more effectively but also sheds light on the under explored issue of service registry evolution, offering valuable insights for researchers.