Using business object patterns for discovery of microservices in enterprise systems

We present software patterns based on business object relationships which can help to identify consumer-oriented parts of enterprise systems suitable for re-engineering as online microservices. The different relationships business objects have in enterprise systems point to distinct structural and behavioural properties which provide insights for system re-engineering and re-structuring. Building upon existing business object and system structural definitions, we introduce six business object relationship patterns for microservice discovery, namely sub-typing, commonality, association, inclusive containment, exclusive containment and read separation. A prototype analysis tool was developed to recognise occurrences of these patterns in program code and to propose microservices based on them. Practical experiments were conducted on two customer management systems, SugarCRM and ChurchCRM, and on an enterprise resource planning system, Dolibarr. Empirical results show that microservices developed via our business object patterns support desirable microservice characteristics, such as low coupling and high cohesion, scalability, availability and processing efficiency