Challenges and Practical Approaches for Managing Evolving Web Services

Web services are popular and used by a broad number of clients, such as browsers and mobile devices. They are used by developers to create applications or even new web services. Once a web service is published, it is expected to undergo changes over time due to new business contexts. The resulting challenge for the web service provider is the introduction of those changes while minimizing or preventing impact on existing client applications. For that reason, change strategies have to be planned and are part of the web service development.

Therefore, this thesis identifies and discusses change strategies, that were found in concepts and practise. Further, the importance of documenting APIs, especially API changes, have been examined. Furthermore, on the basis of previous foundings, a change strategy has been designed for web services, with a discussion of change scenarios.