A Case Study in Matching Service Descriptions to Implementations in an Existing System

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed case study on matching service descriptions to code implementations during migration to Service Oriented Architectures, including methodology, results, and heuristics for partial automation.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic methodology for matching service models to code in existing systems and validates heuristics to automate this process.

Findings

Heuristics can improve matching efficiency

Systematic approach aids in migration planning

Partial automation is feasible with proposed heuristics

Abstract

A number of companies are trying to migrate large monolithic software systems to Service Oriented Architectures. A common approach to do this is to first identify and describe desired services (i.e., create a model), and then to locate portions of code within the existing system that implement the described services. In this paper we describe a detailed case study we undertook to match a model to an open-source business application. We describe the systematic methodology we used, the results of the exercise, as well as several observations that throw light on the nature of this problem. We also suggest and validate heuristics that are likely to be useful in partially automating the process of matching service descriptions to implementations.