Analyzing the evolution of web services using finegrained changes

Abstract—In the service-oriented paradigm web service in-terfaces are considered contracts between web service sub-scribers and providers. However, these interfaces are continu-ously evolving over time to satisfy changes in the requirements and to fix bugs. Changes in a web service interface typically affect the systems of its subscribers. Therefore, it is essential for subscribers to recognize which types of changes occur in a web service interface in order to analyze the impact on his/her systems. In this paper we propose a tool called WSDLDiff to extract fine-grained changes from subsequent versions of a web service interface defined in WSDL. In contrast to existing approaches, WSDLDiff takes into account the syntax of WSDL and extracts the WSDL elements affected by changes and the types of changes. With WSDLDiff we performed a study aimed a