Wesley K. G. Assunção

Syeda Tasnim Fabiha, Saad Shafiq, Wesley Klewerton Guez Assunção et al.

Service-based architecture (SBA) has gained attention in industry and academia as a means to modernize legacy systems. It refers to a design style that enables systems to be developed as suites of small, loosely coupled, and autonomous components (services) that encapsulate functionality and communicate via language-agnostic APIs. However, defining appropriately sized services that capture cohesive subsets of system functionality remains challenging. Existing work often relies on the availability of documentation, access to project personnel, or a priori knowledge of the target number of services, assumptions that do not hold in many real-world scenarios. Our work addresses these limitations using a deep reinforcement learning-based approach to identify appropriately sized services directly from implementation artifacts. We present Rake, a reinforcement learning-based technique that leverages available system documentation and source code to guide service decomposition at the level of implementation methods. Rake does not require specific documentation or access to project personnel and is language-agnostic. It also supports a customizable objective function that balances modularization quality and business capability alignment, i.e., the degree to which a service covers the targeted business capability. We applied Rake to four open-source legacy projects and compared it with two state-of-the-art techniques. On average, Rake achieved 7-14 percent higher modularization quality and 18-22 percent stronger business capability alignment. Our results further show that optimizing solely for business context can degrade decomposition quality in tightly coupled systems, highlighting the need for balanced objectives.

Delfina Ramos-Vidal, Alejandro Cortiñas, Miguel R. Luaces et al.

Many businesses depend on legacy systems, which often use outdated technology that complicates maintenance and updates. Therefore, software modernization is essential, particularly data migration between different database schemas. Established methodologies, like model transformation and ETL tools, facilitate this migration; they require deep knowledge of database languages and both the source and target schemas. This necessity renders data migration an error-prone and cognitively demanding task. Our objective is to alleviate developers' workloads during schema evolution through our DAMI-Framework. This framework incorporates a domain-specific language (DSL) and a parser to facilitate data migration between database schemas. DAMI-DSL simplifies schema mapping while the parser automates SQL script generation. We assess developer experience in data migration by conducting an empirical evaluation with 21 developers to assess their experiences using our DSL versus traditional SQL. The study allows us to measure their perceptions of the DSL properties and user experience. The participants praised DAMI-DSL for its readability and ease of use. The findings indicate that our DSL reduces data migration efforts compared to SQL scripts.

José L. Barros-Justo, Luisa Rincón, Ángela Villota et al.

The value of a systematic secondary study (a systematic mapping study (SMS) or a systematic literature review (SLR)) comes, directly, from its systematic nature. The formal, well-defined, objective and unbiased process guarantees that the results from these systematically conducted studies are valid. This process is embodied in an action protocol, which must be agreed upon by all the researchers before conducting the secondary study. The protocol is, therefore, a detailed action plan, which contains all the tasks and the ordered sequence of steps to be executed. This document details that protocol for a SLR on the adoption of the software product line engineering (SPLE) approach in industrial development contexts. The goal of that SLR is to identify and analyse the benefits and drawbacks that this adoption has had in industrial development contexts, in contrast to the experiences reported in academic environments.