# Collecting Service-Based Maintainability Metrics from RESTful API Descriptions: Static Analysis and Threshold Derivation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.10405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From REST to MCP: An Empirical Study of API Wrapping and Automated Server Generation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16044/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While many maintainability metrics have been explicitly designed for service-based systems, tool-supported approaches to automatically collect these metrics are lacking. Especially in the context of microservices, decentralization and technological heterogeneity may pose challenges for static analysis. We therefore propose the modular and extensible RAMA approach (RESTful API Metric Analyzer) to calculate such metrics from machine-readable interface descriptions of RESTful services. We also provide prototypical tool support, the RAMA CLI, which currently parses the formats OpenAPI, RAML, and WADL and calculates 10 structural service-based metrics proposed in scientific literature. To make RAMA measurement results more actionable, we additionally designed a repeatable benchmark for quartile-based threshold ranges (green, yellow, orange, red). In an exemplary run, we derived thresholds for all RAMA CLI metrics from the interface descriptions of 1,737 publicly available RESTful APIs. Researchers and practitioners can use RAMA to evaluate the maintainability of RESTful services or to support the empirical evaluation of new service interface metrics.