Conformance Assessment of Architectural Design Decisions on the Mapping of Domain Model Elements to APIs and API Endpoints: Dataset and Code

This is the dataset and related code artifact for the article "Conformance Assessment of Architectural Design Decisions on the Mapping of Domain Model Elements to APIs and API Endpoints".

Abstract of the article:

   Microservice APIs are often identified and designed based on Domain-Driven Design (DDD). To help in the continuous analysis of mappings of domain model elements to APIs and API endpoints, we aim to automate the assessment of conformance to Architectural Design Decision (ADD) options. The ADDs, their decision options, and relevant decision drivers studied in this paper originate from an empirical study on the mapping of domain model elements to APIs and API endpoints in practice. We propose automated detectors to detect the decision options of the ADDs taken in a given microservice API model, and an assessment scoring scheme based on the empirical knowledge codified in the ADDs. We evaluate our work, by first manually creating a ground truth for 14 cases in a multi-case study, and then comparing the results of our automated detectors to the ground truth for each of the 14 cases. In the cases we were able to identify 86\% of the decision points correctly, and a statistical analysis of our data shows only a negligible effect size for differences to the ground truth.