Abstract
A number of approaches have been proposed to identify service boundaries when decomposing a monolith to microservices. However, only a few use systematic methods and have been demonstrated with replicable empirical studies. We describe a systematic approach for refactoring systems to microservice architectures that uses static analysis to determine the system’s structure and dynamic analysis to understand its actual behavior. A prototype of a tool was built using this approach (MonoBreaker) and was used to conduct a case study on a real-world software project. The goal was to assess the feasibility and benefits of a systematic approach to decomposition that combines static and dynamic analysis. The three study participants regarded as positive the decomposition proposed by our tool, and considered that it showed improvements over approaches that rely only on static analysis.
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- 1.
More information is found at the tool’s website – https://fluxicon.com/disco/.
- 2.
MonoBreaker is freely available at https://github.com/tiagoCMatias/monoBreaker.
- 3.
See https://github.com/jazzband/django-silk for more information.
- 4.
Connectivity-based clustering algorithm, such as Girvam-Newman, are based on the idea that nodes have more affinity to nearby nodes than to those farther way.
- 5.
Throughout this section, we’ll use this notation to represent the answers of the three team members to a questionnaire item using a five-level Likert scale.
- 6.
Gephi is a tool for graph analysis and visualization – https://gephi.org.
- 7.
This was possible by synthesizing a part of the inputs that it requires – namely, the ERM – and omitting the remaining inputs, which we were unable to create without resourcing to software developers – namely, the User Representations and the Coupling Criteria.
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Acknowledgment
João Paiva Pinto and Isabel Azevedo discussed different forms of this work with us. We thank them for all the precious feedback.
This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project UIDB/50014/2020.
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Matias, T., Correia, F.F., Fritzsch, J., Bogner, J., Ferreira, H.S., Restivo, A. (2020). Determining Microservice Boundaries: A Case Study Using Static and Dynamic Software Analysis. In: Jansen, A., Malavolta, I., Muccini, H., Ozkaya, I., Zimmermann, O. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12292. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58923-3_21
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