Specification and Detection of SOA Antipatterns

Like any other complex software system, Service Based Systems (SBSs) must evolve to fit new user requirements and execution contexts. The changes resulting from the evolution of SBSs may degrade their design and quality of service (QoS) and may often cause the appearance of common poor solutions, called Antipatterns. Antipatterns resulting from these changes also hinder the future maintenance and evolution of SBSs. The automatic detection of antipatterns is thus important to assess the design and QoS of SBSs and ease their maintenance and evolution. However, methods and techniques for the detection of antipatterns in SBSs are still in their infancy despite their importance. In this paper, we introduce a novel and innovative approach supported by a framework for specifying and detecting antipatterns in SBSs. Using our approach, we specify 10 well-known and common antipatterns, including Multi Service and Tiny Service, and we automatically generate their detection algorithms. We apply and validate the detection algorithms in terms of precision and recall on Home-Automation, an SBS developed independently. This validation demonstrates that our approach enables the specification and detection of SOA antipatterns with the precision of more than 90% and the recall of 100%.