An information retrieval based approach for measuring service conceptual cohesion

High cohesion as a desirable principle in software design has an incredible impact on software reuse, maintenance and support. In service-oriented architecture (SOA), the focus of services on single business functionality is defined as conceptual cohesion. Current metrics for measuring service cohesion reflect mostly the structural aspect of cohesion and therefore cannot be utilized to measure conceptual cohesion of services. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), on the other hand, is an information retrieval technique and is widely used to measure the degree of similarity between a set of text based documents. In this paper, a metric namely SCD is proposed that measure the conceptual cohesion of services based on LSI technique. This metric consider both service functionality and operation sequence to measure the conceptual cohesion. An evaluation of the metric based on a set of cohesion principles and comparison with the previously proposed metrics are also provided.