Microservice architecture recovery based on intra-service and inter-service features

Abstract

Microservice architecture supports independent development and deployment; it facilitates software system design and co-development. However, it also brings new challenges to a variety of software engineering tasks, especially in reverse engineering. An improper design or maintenance routine may cause complex invocation, obscure code logic, and complicate service layers, which may lead to difficulties in understanding, even further testing, or maintenance. To reduce the severity of this problem, we present a novel microservice architecture recovery technique that parses the source code to build a fine-grained dependency graph. This process recovers six key information components of the microservice architecture, which helps developers understand the system. Experimental results based on 12 projects show that the recovered accuracy is 94% on average. The results benefit any engineer unfamiliar with the project, increases their answering accuracy by 23.81% on average, and reduces their training time by 65.43% on average.