Estimating Functional Reusability of Services

Services are self-contained software components that can be used platform independent and that aim at maximizing software reuse. A basic concern in service oriented architectures is to measure the reusability of services. One of the most important qualities is the functional reusability, which indicates how relevant the task is that a service solves. Current metrics for functional reusability of software, however, either require source code analysis or have very little explanatory power. This paper gives a formally described vision statement for the estimation of functional reusability of services and sketches an exemplary reusability metric that is based on the service descriptions.