A Type-Sensitive Service Identification Approach for Legacy-to-SOA Migration.

A common strategy for modernizing legacy systems is to migrate them to service-oriented architecture (SOA). A key step in the migration process is the identification of reusable functionalities in the system that qualify as candidate services in the target architecture. We propose ServiceMiner, a bottom-up service identification approach that relies on source code analysis, because other sources of information may be unavailable or out of sync with the actual code. Our bottom-up, code-based approach uses service-type specific functional-clustering criteria. We use a categorization of service types that builds on published service taxonomies and describes the code-level patterns characterizing types of services. We evaluate ServiceMiner on an open-source, enterprise-scale legacy ERP system and compare our results to those of two state-of-the-art approaches. We show that ServiceMiner automates one of the main labor-intensive steps for migrating legacy systems to SOA. It identifies architecturally-significant services with 77.9% of precision, 66.4% of recall, and 71.7% of F-measure. Also, we show that it could be used to assist practitioners in the identification of candidate services in existing systems and thus to support the migration process of legacy systems to SOA.