English

Tools for Refactoring to Microservices: A Preliminary Usability Report

Software Engineering 2023-11-10 v2

Abstract

While Microservices are a preferred choice for modern cloud-based applications, the migration and architectural refactoring of existing legacy systems is still a major challenge in industry. To address this, academia has proposed many strategies and approaches that aim to automate the process of decomposing a monolith into functional units. In this study, we review existing migration approaches regarding techniques used and tool support. From 91 publications, we extracted 22 tools, 7 of which address service decomposition. To assess them from an end-user perspective, we investigated their underlying techniques, installation, documentation, usability and support. For 5 of them, we generated service cuts using reference applications. The results of our preliminary work suggest that the inspected tools pursue promising concepts, but lack maturity and generalizability for reliable use by industry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.04798,
  title  = {Tools for Refactoring to Microservices: A Preliminary Usability Report},
  author = {Jonas Fritzsch and Filipe Correia and Justus Bogner and Stefan Wagner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.04798},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Presented at the 5th International Conference on Microservices (2023); https://www.conf-micro.services/2023/

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:15:17.996Z