Identifying Reusable Services in Legacy Object-Oriented Systems: A Type-Sensitive Identification Approach

Identifying Reusable Services in Legacy Object-Oriented Systems: A Type-Sensitive Identification Approach. Abdellatif, M., Moha, N., Gu�h�neuc, Y., Mili, H., & El Boussaidi, G. Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 51(10):2879–2899, IEEE CS Press, October, 2025. 21 pages.

Paper abstract bibtex

The migration of legacy software systems to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one of the main strategies for modernising such systems. The success of modernising a legacy system to a SOA highly depends on the used service identification approach where the goal is to identify reusable functionalities that could become services. In this paper, we perform a comparative analysis of service identification approaches proposed by academia and industry. We show that there is a gap between academia and industry in the used approaches to identify services from legacy systems. We extract from the comparative analysis several recommendations about the inputs, processes, and outputs that a service identification approach should have. Based on these recommendations, we propose ServiceMiner, a bottom-up service identification approach, which relies on source-code analysis, because other sources of information may be unavailable or out of sync with the actual code. ServiceMiner relies on a categorisation of service types and code-level patterns characterising types of services. We evaluate ServiceMiner on four case studies. We also compare our results to those of three state-of-the-art approaches. We show that ServiceMiner identifies architecturally-significant services with, on average, 78% precision, 76% recall, and 77% F-measure.

@ARTICLE{Abdellatif25-TSE-TypeSensitiveServices,
   AUTHOR       = {Manel Abdellatif and Naouel Moha and Yann-Ga�l Gu�h�neuc and 
      Hafedh Mili and El Boussaidi, Ghizlane},
   JOURNAL      = {Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE)},
   TITLE        = {Identifying Reusable Services in Legacy Object-Oriented 
      Systems: A Type-Sensitive Identification Approach},
   YEAR         = {2025},
   MONTH        = {October},
   NOTE         = {21 pages.},
   NUMBER       = {10},
   PAGES        = {2879&ndash;2899},
   VOLUME       = {51},
   EDITOR       = {Mauro Pezze},
   KEYWORDS     = {Topic: <b>Evolution patterns</b>, 
      Rubrique : <b>patrons d'�volution</b>, Journal: <b>TSE</b>},
   PUBLISHER    = {IEEE CS Press},
   URL          = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/TSE25a.doc.pdf},
   ABSTRACT     = {The migration of legacy software systems to a 
      service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one of the main strategies for 
      modernising such systems. The success of modernising a legacy system 
      to a SOA highly depends on the used service identification approach 
      where the goal is to identify reusable functionalities that could 
      become services. In this paper, we perform a comparative analysis of 
      service identification approaches proposed by academia and industry. 
      We show that there is a gap between academia and industry in the used 
      approaches to identify services from legacy systems. We extract from 
      the comparative analysis several recommendations about the inputs, 
      processes, and outputs that a service identification approach should 
      have. Based on these recommendations, we propose ServiceMiner, a 
      bottom-up service identification approach, which relies on 
      source-code analysis, because other sources of information may be 
      unavailable or out of sync with the actual code. ServiceMiner relies 
      on a categorisation of service types and code-level patterns 
      characterising types of services. We evaluate ServiceMiner on four 
      case studies. We also compare our results to those of three 
      state-of-the-art approaches. We show that ServiceMiner identifies 
      architecturally-significant services with, on average, 78% precision, 
      76% recall, and 77% F-measure.}
}

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