A controlled experiment for evaluating the impact of coupling on the maintainability of service-oriented software

One of the goals of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is to improve software maintainability as businesses become more agile and thus underlying processes and rules change more frequently. This paper presents a controlled experiment examining the relationship between coupling in service-oriented designs, as measured using a recently proposed suite of SOC-specific coupling metrics, and software maintainability in terms of the specific sub-characteristics of analysability, changeability, and stability. The results indicate a statistically significant causal relationship between the investigated coupling metrics and the maintainability of service-oriented software. As such, the investigated metrics can facilitate design decisions leading to the specification of more maintainable service-oriented software products.