A Metric for Functional Reusability of Services

Services are self-contained software components that can beused platform independent and that aim at maximizing software reuse. Abasic concern in service oriented architectures is to measure the reusabilityof services. One of the most important qualities is the functionalreusability, which indicates how relevant the task is that a service solves.Current metrics for functional reusability of software, however, have verylittle explanatory power and do not accomplish this goal.This paper presents a new approach to estimate the functional reusabilityof services based on their relevance. To this end, it denes the degreeto which a service enables the execution of other services as its contri-bution. Based on the contribution, relevance of services is dened as anestimation for their functional reusability. Explanatory power is obtainedby normalizing relevance values with a reference service. The applicationof the metric to a service test set conrms its supposed capabilities.