Recommendations on Maintainability Issues in Web Services

Abstract

Web services are components that are capable of performing a certain task, like two devices communicating with each other and exchanging information. With the increase in use of web service software, following the good practices for maintainability plays an important role as it helps to reduce maintenance cost and improve software quality. Many problems are faced by the developers nowadays and they need a platform to discuss these problems and get information on how to resolve them by an expert opinion. They ask questions on the discussion forums or the Community Question Answering (CQA) sites such as Stack Overflow and Quora. These problems include: outdated online code snippets, maintainability issues in reuse of existing libraries, RESTful webservices composition. The Representational State Transfer (REST) is an established architectural paradigm utilised in the development and design of web services. The system employs the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to facilitate the transmission and reception of data. It is one of the most used domains and asked about on CQA sites. The state-of-the-art tools and techniques are limited as they mostly cover theoretical knowledge to state RESTful web services patterns. We need to consider the industrial opinion as their opinions can be used to overcome many problems and identify new ones for resolution. A new approach is proposed in which the existing practices defined in the literature are used as a benchmark and expertise opinions are extracted from Stack Overflow accepted answers. Recommendations are formed on the basis of the experts’ opinion and used in a tool which detects the area of discussion and suggests expert’s pattern definitions.