From Monolith to Microservices: A Semi-Automated Approach for Legacy to Modern Architecture Transition using Static Analysis

Abstract

Modern system architecture may increase the maintainability of the system and promote the sustainability of the system. Nowadays, more and more organizations are looking towards microservice due to its positive impact on the business which can be translated into delivering quality products to the market faster than ever before. On top of that, native support of DevOps is also desirable. However, transforming legacy system architecture to modern architecture is challenging. As manual modernization is inefficient due to its time-intensive and the significant amount of effort required, the software architect is looking for an automated or semi-automated approach for easy and smooth transformation. Hence, this work proposed a semi-automated approach to transform legacy architecture to modern system architecture based on static analysis techniques. This bottom-up approach utilized legacy source code to adhere to the modern architecture framework. We studied the manual transformation pattern for architectural conversion and explore the possibility of providing transformation rules and guidelines. A task-based experiment was conducted to evaluate the correctness and efficiency of the approach. Two open-source projects were selected and several software architects participated in an architectural transformation task as well as in the survey. We found that the new approach promotes an efficient migration process and produces correct software artifacts with minimum errors rates.