Six reasons for rejecting an industrial survey paper

Context: Despite their importance in any empirically based research program, industrial surveys are not very common in the software engineering literature. In our experience, a possible reason is their difficulty of publication. Goal: We would like to understand what are the issues that may prevent the publication of papers reporting industrial surveys. Method: In this preliminary work, we analyzed the surveys we conducted and extracted the main lessons learned in terms of issues and problems. Results: Most common critics posed to industrial surveys are: lack of novelty, limitation of the geographic scope and sampling issues. Conclusions: Most objections that led to reject a survey paper actually are not easy to overcome and others are not so serious. These objections could restrain researchers from conducting this type of studies that represent an important methodological asset. For these reasons, we think that reviewers should be less severe to judge survey papers provided that all the limitations of the study are well explained and highlighte

Exploring Maintainability Assurance Research for Service- and Microservice-Based Systems: Directions and Differences

To ensure sustainable software maintenance and evolution, a diverse set of activities and concepts like metrics, change impact analysis, or antipattern detection can be used. Special maintainability assurance techniques have been proposed for service- and microservice-based systems, but it is difficult to get a comprehensive overview of this publication landscape. We therefore conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to collect and categorize maintainability assurance approaches for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices. Our search strategy led to the selection of 223 primary studies from 2007 to 2018 which we categorized with a threefold taxonomy: a) architectural (SOA, microservices, both), b) methodical (method or contribution of the study), and c) thematic (maintainability assurance subfield). We discuss the distribution among these categories and present different research directions as well as exemplary studies per thematic category. The primary finding of our SLR is that, while very few approaches have been suggested for microservices so far (24 of 223, ?11%), we identified several thematic categories where existing SOA techniques could be adapted for the maintainability assurance of microservices

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Service Oriented Architecture Adoption: A Systematic Review

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has appeared as an absorbing architectural approach that empowers the available systems to reveal their performance in the act of services without creating important changes to the systems. This approach, due to its flexibility of adoption, has been widely appreciated by the businesses. Though there are many studies that depict successful factors of SOA, a few minor cases of failure have also been reported in the literature. In spite of the availability of rich material on SOA, there is no systematic literature review on the influential aspect of SOA adoption factors. Thus, this paper presents a systematic literature review of existing studies (from 2009 to 2015) related to the SOA adoption and its success and failure. The central purpose of the study is to focus on the existing issues and share the findings with researchers. Moreover, the findings of this paper would help the IT experts in organizations focus on the most important factors highlighted in this study, so they could decide whether it is advisable to adopt SOA in their context or not

From Monolith to Microservices: A Classification of Refactoring Approaches

While the recently emerged Microservices architectural style is widely discussed in literature, it is difficult to find clear guidance on the process of refactoring legacy applications. The importance of the topic is underpinned by high costs and effort of a refactoring process which has several other implications, e.g. overall processes (DevOps) and team structure. Software architects facing this challenge are in need of selecting an appropriate strategy and refactoring technique. One of the most discussed aspects in this context is finding the right service granularity to fully leverage the advantages of a Microservices architecture. This study first discusses the notion of architectural refactoring and subsequently compares 10 existing refactoring approaches recently proposed in academic literature. The approaches are classified by the underlying decomposition technique and visually presented in the form of a decision guide for quick reference. The review yielded a variety of strategies to break down a monolithic application into independent services. With one exception, most approaches are only applicable under certain conditions. Further concerns are the significant amount of input data some approaches require as well as limited or prototypical tool support.Comment: 13 pages, 4 tables, 2 figures, Software Engineering Aspects of Continuous Development and New Paradigms of Software Production and Deployment, First International Workshop, DEVOPS 2018, Chateau de Villebrumier, France, March 5-6, 2018, Revised Selected Paper

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse