A Novel Effort Estimation Approach for Migration of SOA Applications to Microservices

Abstract

Microservices architecture's popularity is rapidly growing as it eases the design of enterprise applications by allowing independent development and deployment of services. Due to this paradigm shift in software development, many existing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications are being migrated to microservices. Estimating the effort required for migration is a key challenge as it helps the architects in better planning and execution of the migration process. Since the designing style and deployment environments are different for each service, existing effort estimation models in the literature are not ideal for microservice architecture. To estimate the effort required for migrating SOA application to microservices, we propose a new effort estimation model called Service Points. We define a formal model called service graph which represents the components of the service based architectures and their interactions among the services. Service graph provides the information required for the estimation process. We recast the use case points method and model it to become suitable for microservices architecture. We have updated the technical and environmental factors used for the effort estimation. The proposed approach is demonstrated by estimating the migration effort for a standard SOA based web application. The proposed model is compatible with the design principles of microservices and provides a systematic and formal way of estimating the effort. It helps software architects in better planning and execution of the migration process.