Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise Systems
Enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management systems, are widely used in corporate sectors and are notorious for being large, inflexible and monolithic. Their many application-specific methods are challenging to decouple manu...
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IEEE
2025-01-01
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| author | Adambarage Anuruddha Chathuranga de Alwis Alistair Barros Colin Fidge Artem Polyvyanyy |
| author_facet | Adambarage Anuruddha Chathuranga de Alwis Alistair Barros Colin Fidge Artem Polyvyanyy |
| author_sort | Adambarage Anuruddha Chathuranga de Alwis |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management systems, are widely used in corporate sectors and are notorious for being large, inflexible and monolithic. Their many application-specific methods are challenging to decouple manually because they manage asynchronous, user-driven business processes and business objects having complex structural relationships. We present an automated technique for identifying parts of enterprise systems that can run separately as fine-grained microservices in flexible and scalable Cloud systems. Our remodularization technique uses both semantic properties of enterprise systems, i.e., domain-level business object and method relationships, together with syntactic features of the methods’ code, e.g., their call patterns and structural similarity. Semantically, business objects derived from databases form the basis for prospective clustering of those methods that act on them as modules, while on a syntactic level, structural and interaction details between the methods themselves provide further insights into module dependencies for grouping, based on K-means clustering and optimization. Our technique was prototyped and validated using two open-source enterprise customer relationship management systems, SugarCRM<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn3">3</xref> and ChurchCRM. The empirical results demonstrate improved feasibility of remodularizing enterprise systems, inclusive of coded business objects and methods, compared to microservices constructed using class-level decoupling of business objects only. Furthermore, the microservices recommended, integrated with “backend” enterprise systems, demonstrate improvements in execution efficiency, scalability, and availability. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-9a3894563cb240e082bd746950f34d2c |
| institution | OA Journals |
| issn | 2169-3536 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2025-01-01 |
| publisher | IEEE |
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| spelling | doaj-art-9a3894563cb240e082bd746950f34d2c2025-08-20T02:32:49ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-011310055710057110.1109/ACCESS.2025.357709511025477Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise SystemsAdambarage Anuruddha Chathuranga de Alwis0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4954-6595Alistair Barros1Colin Fidge2https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9410-7217Artem Polyvyanyy3https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7672-1643School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, QLD, AustraliaSchool of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, QLD, AustraliaSchool of Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, QLD, AustraliaSchool of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, AustraliaEnterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management systems, are widely used in corporate sectors and are notorious for being large, inflexible and monolithic. Their many application-specific methods are challenging to decouple manually because they manage asynchronous, user-driven business processes and business objects having complex structural relationships. We present an automated technique for identifying parts of enterprise systems that can run separately as fine-grained microservices in flexible and scalable Cloud systems. Our remodularization technique uses both semantic properties of enterprise systems, i.e., domain-level business object and method relationships, together with syntactic features of the methods’ code, e.g., their call patterns and structural similarity. Semantically, business objects derived from databases form the basis for prospective clustering of those methods that act on them as modules, while on a syntactic level, structural and interaction details between the methods themselves provide further insights into module dependencies for grouping, based on K-means clustering and optimization. Our technique was prototyped and validated using two open-source enterprise customer relationship management systems, SugarCRM<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn3">3</xref> and ChurchCRM. The empirical results demonstrate improved feasibility of remodularizing enterprise systems, inclusive of coded business objects and methods, compared to microservices constructed using class-level decoupling of business objects only. Furthermore, the microservices recommended, integrated with “backend” enterprise systems, demonstrate improvements in execution efficiency, scalability, and availability.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11025477/Microservice discoveryenterprise systemssystem remodularization |
| spellingShingle | Adambarage Anuruddha Chathuranga de Alwis Alistair Barros Colin Fidge Artem Polyvyanyy Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise Systems IEEE Access Microservice discovery enterprise systems system remodularization |
| title | Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise Systems |
| title_full | Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise Systems |
| title_fullStr | Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise Systems |
| title_full_unstemmed | Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise Systems |
| title_short | Method-Level Syntactic and Semantic Clustering for Microservice Discovery in Legacy Enterprise Systems |
| title_sort | method level syntactic and semantic clustering for microservice discovery in legacy enterprise systems |
| topic | Microservice discovery enterprise systems system remodularization |
| url | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11025477/ |
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