Abstract
Web services are black box dependency magnets. Hence, studying how they evolve is both important and challenging. In this paper, we focus on one of the most successful stories of the service-oriented paradigm in industry, i.e., the Amazon services. We perform a principled empirical study, that detects evolution patterns and regularities, based on Lehman’s laws of software evolution. Our findings indicate that service evolution comes with spikes of change, followed by calm periods where the service is internally enhanced. Although spikes come with unpredictable volume, developers can count in the near certainty of the calm periods following them to allow their absorption. As deletions rarely occur, both the complexity and the exported functionality of a service increase over time (in fact, predictably). Based on the above findings, we provide recommendations that can be used by the developers of Web service applications for service selection and application maintenance.
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