An Ensemble of Complexity Metrics for BPEL Web Processes

So far a significant amount of research has been done on the complexity of software programs, and various software complexity metrics have been developed but few researches on process complexity measurement, especially BPEL processes, has yet been carried out. Since several organizations have already realized the potential of using the Business Process Execution Language for Web Service (BPEL4WS) to model the behavior of web services in business processes we feel however, that it is important to focus on complexity metrics to evaluate the complexity of BPEL processes because in some cases, BPEL process deigns can be highly complex and consequently can result in several undesirable drawbacks. Analyzing the complexity via metrics at all the stages of process deign and development helps avoid these drawbacks. This paper analyzes the complexity metrics of BPEL web process that have been proposed by earlier researches and addresses the issues related to development of these metrics. We believe that our work contributes to a better understanding of BPEL complexity and can be used as a reference for those who want to analyze the design of web processes using measurement strategies.