Technical report: Function-splitting heuristics for discovery of microservices in enterprise systems

We present heuristics that help to identify suitable consumer-oriented parts of enterprise systems which could be re-engineered as microservices. Our approach assesses the key structural and behavioural properties common to both enterprise and microservice systems, as needed to guide a microservices discovery process and coherently assess restructuring recommendations. Building upon existing business object and system structural definitions, we present heuristics for two fundamental areas of microservice discovery, namely function splitting based on object subtypes (i.e., the lowest granularity of software based on structural properties) and functional splitting based on common execution fragments across software (i.e., the lowest granularity of software based on behavioural properties). A prototype analysis tool was developed based on the defined heuristics and experiments show that it can identify microservice designs which support multiple microservice characteristics, such as high cohesion, low coupling, high scalability, availability and processing efficiency while preserving coherent features of enterprise systems. In particular, we illustrate the usefulness of this new approach by conducting a case study based on a customer management systems (SugarCRM, ChurchCRM)

Function-splitting heuristics for discovery of microservices in enterprise systems

We present heuristics that help to identify suitable consumer-oriented parts of enterprise systems which could be re-engineered as microservices. Our approach assesses the key structural and behavioural properties common to both enterprise and microservice systems, as needed to guide a microservices discovery process and coherently assess restructuring recommendations. Building upon existing business object and system structural definitions, we present heuristics for two fundamental areas of microservice discovery, namely function splitting based on object subtypes (i.e., the lowest granularity of software based on structural properties) and functional splitting based on common execution fragments across software (i.e., the lowest granularity of software based on behavioural properties). A prototype analysis tool was developed based on the defined heuristics and experiments show that it can identify microservice designs which support multiple microservice characteristics, such as high cohesion, low coupling, high scalability, high availability, and processing efficiency while preserving coherent features of enterprise systems. In particular, we illustrate the usefulness of this new approach by conducting a case study based on customer management systems: SugarCRM and ChurchCRM

Discovering microservices in enterprise systems using a business object containment heuristic

The growing impact of IoT and Blockchain platforms on business applications has increased interest in leveraging large enterprise systems as Cloud-enabled microservices. However, large and monolithic enterprise systems are unsuitable for flexible integration with such platforms. This paper presents a technique to support the re-engineering of an enterprise system based on the fundamental mechanisms for structuring its architecture, i.e., business objects managed by software functions and their relationships which influence business object interactions via the functions. The technique relies on a heuristic for deriving business object exclusive containment relationships based on analysis of source code and system logs. Furthermore, the paper provides an analysis of distributing enterprise systems based on the business object containment relationships using the NSGA II software clustering and optimization technique. The heuristics and the software clustering and optimization techniques have been validated against two open-source enterprise systems: SugarCRM and ChurchCRM. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can identify microservice designs which support multiple desired microservice characteristics, such as high cohesion, low coupling, high scalability, high availability, and processing efficiency

Six Sigma as a Business Process Management Method in Services: Analysis of the Key Application Problems

Apart from being applied in production, Six Sigma has grown considerably in importance as a business process management (BPM) method in services. The transfer of the method from production to service applications does, however, pose problems which affect the success of implementing Six Sigma as a BPM method in services. For a successful application of the Six Sigma method in services it is helpful to know these possible problems in order to be able to avoid them and to achieve the goals of Six Sigma improvement projects. In addition from a theoretical view knowing the problems is a first step for further development of the Six Sigma method. Therefore, the present article deals with the following questions: which key problems regarding the application of Six Sigma in services are mentioned in the literature and which phases of the Six Sigma cycle can they be assigned to? The existing literature on this subject is reviewed and a qualitative content analysis of its contents is presented. Additionally, a survey based on the problems found in the literature is conducted to compare theory and practice. The evaluation of the results shows, on the one hand, that to date the problems of the application of Six Sigma in services have little been dealt with. On the other hand the evaluation provides a survey of the problems structured in accordance to the phases of the Six Sigma cycle. Thus, the present paper offers new findings as regards the state-of-the-art of the Six Sigma method