Assessing Readability of Web Service Interfaces

ALAN DE RENZIS; MARTÍN GARRIGA; ANDRES FLORES; ALEJANDRA CECHICH; CRISTIAN MAXIMILIANO MATEOS DIAZ; ALEJANDRO ZUNINO

Valparaiso

Conferencia; CLEI'16, XLII Latin American Computing Conference; 2016

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 existingsemantic 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.