Metrics for BPEL process context-independency analysis

BPEL processes are workflow-oriented composite services for service-oriented solutions. Rapidly changing environment and turbulent market conditions require flexible BPEL processes to adapt with several modifications during their life cycles. Such adaptability and flexibility require the low degree of dependency or coupling between a BPEL process and its surrounding environment. In fact, heavy coupling and context dependency with partners provoke several undesirable drawbacks such as poor understandability, inflexibility, inadaptability, and defects. This paper is to propose metrics at the design phase to measure BPEL process context independency. With the aid of these metrics, the architect could analyze and control the context independency of a BPEL process quantitatively. To validate the metrics, authors collected a data set consisting 70 BPEL processes and also gathered the expert’s rating of context independency through conducting a controlled experiment. The obtained results reveal that there exists a high statistical correlation between the proposed metrics and the expert’s judgment of context independency.