Tool Support for the Migration to Microservice Architecture: An Industrial Case Study

With the introduction of microservice architecture, many investigate how to migrate their legacy systems into this architectural paradigm. The migration process requires the recovery of the project architecture to be migrated together with the knowledge necessary to understand how to decompose the code and obtain new microservices. At the moment, this process is realized mostly manually. This paper introduces an approach to identify candidate microservices in monolithic Java projects, implemented in a tool named Arcan and the validation of the approach in an industrial setting. The approach involves static analysis of the system architecture, architectural smell detection and topic detection, a text mining method used here to model software domains starting from code analysis. We report the feedbacks we get from an experienced industrial developer who carried out the migration described in the case study. From this collaboration with industry we collected useful information to enhance the approach, improve the tool and replicate the study.