Agape: A Syntactic-Based Analysis Method for Automatic API Connection Points Discovery in Systems-of-Information Systems

Abstract

Establishing interoperability links is a significant challenge in systems-of-information systems (SoIS) engineering. Even with constituent systems (CS) interfaces documentation, achieving such links is a difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone task that requires attention from CS developers, especially if it is performed manually. In order to contribute to this task, we propose Agape, a semiautomatic method using syntactic similarity analysis of API attributes to identify potential CS connection points. We implemented the AgapeTool tool based on the method and performed two-fold evaluations. In the preliminary evaluation, we executed a controlled experiment to evaluate the performance of AgapeTool and empirically define the best similarity algorithms and thresholds for the task of identifying connection points between two well known API. In the evaluation, we use AgapeTool in two cases involving four CS API from a SoIS of a global computer manufacturer. Then, we conducted semistructured interviews with five experienced developers of the target SoIS to evaluate the outcomes. In practice, the results reveal that AgapeTool is effective in both environments, and API syntactic similarity analysis is efficient for identifying CS interoperability links. From a research point, the combination of syntactic and semantic analyzes looks promising for more accurate and reliable results.