Dependency and Entropy Based Impact Analysis for Service-Oriented System Evolution

Abstract

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a widely accepted approach that provides a flexible IT infrastructure in order to deal with the increasing pace of business changes and global competition. However, the evolution of SOA challenges traditional research methodologies and motivates us to explore new approaches for analyzing and evaluating the effects of change. In order to identify the basic principles that analyze the SOA evolution, this work will utilize dependency analysis and information entropy. Dependency analysis is applied in order to derive information from service dependencies to measure the relative importance of the service in a service-oriented system. In addition, we combine information entropy with dependency analysis to measure the service and system entropy. Consequently, we provide a quantificational approach based on dependency analysis and information entropy to estimate the change effects on a service-oriented system.