The role of developers’ social relationships in improving service selection

Abstract

Purpose Modern Enterprise Web Application development can exploit third-party software components, both internal and external to the enterprise, that provide access to huge and valuable data sets, tested by millions of users and often available as Web application programming interfaces (APIs). In this context, the developers have to select the right data services and might rely, to this purpose, on advanced techniques, based on functional and non-functional data service descriptive features. This paper focuses on this selection task where data service selection may be difficult because the developer has no control on services, and source reputation could be only partially known. Design/methodology/approach The proposed framework and methodology are apt to provide advanced search and ranking techniques by considering: lightweight data service descriptions, in terms of (semantic) tags and technical aspects; previously developed aggregations of data services, to use in the selection process of a service the past experiences with the services when used in similar applications; social relationships between developers (social network) and their credibility evaluations. This paper also discusses some experimental results regarding the plan to expand other experiments to check how developers feel using the approach. Findings In this paper, a data service selection framework that extends and specializes an existing one for Web APIs selection is presented. The revised multi-layered model for data services is discussed and proper metrics relying on it, meant for supporting the selection of data services in a context of Web application design, are introduced. Model and metrics take into account the network of social relationships between developers, to exploit them for estimating the importance that a developer assigns to other developers’ experience. Originality/value This research, with respect to the state of the art, focuses attention on developers’ social networks in an enterprise context, integrating the developers’ credibility assessment and implementing the social network-based data service selection on top of a rich framework based on a multi-perspective model for data services.