Service Cutter: A Systematic Approach to Service Decomposition
Decomposing a software system into smaller parts always has been a challenge in software engineering. It is particularly important to split distributed systems into loosely coupled and highly cohesive units. Service-oriented architectures and their micros
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University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland (HSR FHO), Oberseestrasse 10, 8640 Rapperswil, Switzerland {michael.gysel,lukas.koelbener}@lifetime.hsr.ch, [email protected] Zühlke Engineering AG, Wiesenstrasse 10a, 8952 Schlieren, Switzerland [email protected]
Abstract. Decomposing a software system into smaller parts always has been a challenge in software engineering. It is particularly important to split distributed systems into loosely coupled and highly cohesive units. Service-oriented architectures and their microservices deployments tackle many related problems, but remain vague on how to cut a system into discrete, autonomous, network-accessible services. In this paper, we propose a structured, repeatable approach to service decomposition based on 16 coupling criteria distilled from the literature and industry experience. These coupling criteria form the base of Service Cutter, our method and tool framework for service decomposition. In the Service Cutter approach, coupling information is extracted from software engineering artifacts such as domain models and use cases and represented as an undirected, weighted graph to find and score densely connected clusters. The resulting candidate service cuts promise to reduce coupling between and promote high cohesion within services. In our validation activities, which included prototyping, action research and case studies, we successfully decomposed two sample applications with acceptable performance; most (but not all) test scenarios resulted in appropriate service cuts. These results as well as early feedback from members of the target audience in industry and academia suggest that our coupling criteria catalog and tool-supported service decomposition approach have the potential to assist a service architect’s design decisions in a viable and practical manner. Keywords: Functional partitioning Loose coupling Knowledge management Microservices Service interface design guidelines Service granularity Service quality
1 Introduction In 1972, D. L. Parnas reflected “On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules” [11]. Since then, functional decomposition has remained an important topic in software engineering. As software systems grew and became more complex, software engineers started to distribute modules and procedures over networks, e.g., as © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved M. Aiello et al. (Eds.): ESOCC 2016, LNCS 9846, pp. 185–200, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44482-6_12
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remote objects, components or Web services [1]. Architectural styles such as ServiceOriented Architecture (SOA) aim at tackling the many design challenges of such distributed systems; however, designing service interface boundaries at the right level of granularity remained an important challenge for SOA practitioners [3, 17]. While partial solutions have been found, two of the related Research Problems (RP) re
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