Conformance Assessment of Architectural Design Decisions on API Endpoint Designs Derived from Domain Models: Dataset and Code

This is the dataset and related code artifact for the article "Conformance Assessment of Architectural Design Decisions on API Endpoint Designs Derived from Domain Models".

Abstract of the article:

Domain-driven design (DDD) is commonly used, especially in enterprise systems, to design microservices. A crucial aspects of microservice design is API design, which includes the design of API endpoints. In particular, we studied link mapping, API operation design, and resource segregation as  API endpoint design issues that are linked to domain model design. Based on Architectural Design Decisions (ADD) studied in a prior empirical study on the interrelation of DDD and APIs, we suggest a new approach for the automated assessment of conformance to ADD options. This approach aims to support the continuous analysis of API endpoint designs. The approach suggests automated detectors to detect ADD options selected in a given API endpoint design, as well as an assessment scoring scheme based on our empirical results. For evaluation of our results, we first manually created a ground truth for 12 cases in a multi-case study, and then compared the results of our automated detectors to the ground truth for each of those cases.