Assessing readability of Web service interfaces

DE RENZIS, A.; GARRIGA, M.; FLORES, A.; CECHICH, A.; MATEOS, C.; ZUNINO, A.

Conferencia; XLII Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI 2016); 2016

CLEI

A Web Service has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Service providers expose their services by publishing their WSDL documents. Service consumers can learn about service capability and how to interact with the services. Service descriptions (WSDL documents) should be ideally understood easily by service stakeholders so that the process of consuming services is simplified. In this work we present a practical metric to quantify readability in WSDL documents. We adapted and extended an existing semantic readability metric to focus on WSDL documents by using WordNet as the underlying concept hierarchy. Finally, we performed a qualitative experiment: a controlled survey with a group of service consumers. The results showed that consumers (software engineers) required less time and effort to analyze WSDL documents with higher readability values.