Assessing Internal Software Quality Attributes of the Object-Oriented and Service-Oriented Software Development Paradigms: A Comparative Study

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming the dominant approach for developing and organizing distributed enterprise-wide applications. Although the concepts of SOA have been extensively described in the literature and industry, the effects of adopting SOA on software quality are still unclear. The aim of the paper is to analyze how adopting SOA can affect software quality as opposed to the Object-Oriented (OO) paradigm and expose the differential implications of adopting both paradigms on software quality. The paper provides a brief introduction of the architectural differences between the Service-Oriented (SO) and OO paradigms and a description of internal software quality metrics used for the comparison. The effects and differences are exposed by providing a case study architected for both paradigms. The quantitative measure concluded in the paper showed that a software system developed using SOA approach provides higher reusability and lower coupling among software modules, but at the same time higher complexity than those of the OO approach. It was also found that some of the existing OO software quality metrics are inapplicable to SOA software systems. As a consequence, new metrics need to be developed specifically to SOA software systems.