Evolution of XSD Documents and Their Variability During Project Life Cycle: A Preliminary Study

• Published in: Computational Science and Its Applications - ICCSA 2016 Vol. 9789; pp. 392 - 406
• Main Authors: de Almeida, Diego Benincasa Fernandes Cavalcanti, Guerra, Eduardo Martins
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2016; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Contract; Network hardware; Software repository mining; Web service; XML; XSD
• ISBN: 3319420887; 9783319420882
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42089-9_28

During a software system life cycle, project modifications occur for different reasons. Regarding web services, communication contracts modifications are equally common, which induces the need for adaptation in every system node. To help reduce the contracts changing impact over software source code, it is necessary to understand how these contract changes occur. This paper presents a preliminary study on the evaluation of the change history of different open-source projects that defines XSD documents, specifying metrics for such files, extracting them by software repository mining and analyzing their evolution during the project life cycle. Based on the results, and considering that Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) contracts use XSD, a deeper study focused on web services projects only is further proposed to assess what exactly is changed at each contract revision, possibly revealing changing tendencies to support easy-to-adapt web service development.