Diagnosing and Measuring Incompatibilities between Pairs of Services

This paper presents a technique which detects all behavioural incompatibilities between two service interfaces (a client and a provider). This may happen because the provider has evolved and its interface has been modified. It may also happen because the client decided to change for another provider which addresses the same needs but offers a different interface. Unlike prior work, the proposed solution does not simply check whether two services are incompatible or not, it rather provides detailed diagnosis, including the incompatibilities and for each one the location in the service interfaces where these incompatibilities occur. A measure of similarity between interfaces which considers outputs from the detection algorithm is proposed too.