A Feature-based Versioning Approach for Assessing Service Compatibility

The ability of dealing with changes is one of the driving forces behind the adoption of service-oriented computing. Service evolution requires sound strategies to appropriately manage versions resulting from changes during service lifecycle. Compatibility addresses the graceful evolution of services by considering the effects of changes on client applications. However, providers cannot always guarantee that the necessary changes yield compatible service descriptions. In practice, providers describe the changes in release notes, focusing on the explicit changes, very often disregarding their cascading effects. Thus, typically it is the responsibility of client's developers to assess the extent of the change and their impact in their particular usage scenario. This work addresses service evolution on a finer grain manner, referred to as features. It describes a versioning model and a compatibility assessment algorithm at service feature level, which allows the identification of changes impact points, and propagation effects, as well as the assessment of changes' compatibility. The article also reports an experiment based on a real service, which explores the versioning model to detect implicit and explicit changes, and validates the algorithm to assess the compatibility of these changes.