WSDARWIN: A Decision-Support Tool for Web-Service Evolution

Service-oriented systems are fundamentally distributed in nature, relying on external services accessible through their public interfaces. Distributed ownership and lack of implementation transparency imply special challenges in the evolution of such systems. In order to alleviate the challenge faced by the consumers of their services, providers should, in principle, take into account the impact that service changes may have on the client applications, in addition to considering the potential benefits to be gained from the evolution of these services. In this paper, we present a decision tree to support the provider´s service-evolution decision-making process. Using game theory, we construct the tree that makes explicit the value-cost trade-offs involved in considering the potential evolution of services.