From Refactoring to Migration: a Quality-Driven Strategy for Microservices Adoption

In the contemporary landscape of software development, the transition towards microservices architecture is often a critical step for organizations aiming to enhance scalability and maintainability. However, maintaining quality standards during this transition is of paramount importance to ensure the continued success of the software system. In this paper, we introduce a migration to microservices approach that strictly considers quality constraints as the main driver of the migration. The approach is built on top of the knowledge acquired in our previous work where we used antipatterns analysis for the refactoring of microservices derived from the monolith. We applied our quality-driven migration approach to the industrial case study of BIM Italia. To measure the effectiveness of our approach we performed a comparative analysis of the time, cost, and effort-related dimensions between the quality-driven migration and the refactoring processes presented and applied in the same company in our previous work. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of our quality-driven migration process in reducing time, costs, and effort, showcasing its merits in practice. This research emphasizes the importance of quality-driven migration strategies when transitioning from monolithic systems to microservices. By employing these principles, organizations can migrate to microservices not only realizing the expected benefits of microservices adoption but also upholding essential quality standards.