Towards a Microservices-Based Product Line with Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms
Willian D. F. Mendonça, Wesley K. G. Assunção, Lucas V. Estanislau, Sílvia Regina Vergílio, Alessandro Garcia · 2020
Microservices are small and independently deployable services. They can be developed on different platforms and communicate via lightweight protocols, what makes them highly interoperable. The interoperability between microservices, as well as their reuse and customization needs make this kind of systems adequate to constitute a Software Product Line. However, there is no automatic approach to support the designing of Microservices-Based Product Lines (MBPLs). To move towards the development of MBPLs, this work presents an approach, named MOEA4MBPL, to extract Feature Models (FMs) from a set of microservices-based systems. These FMs intent to leverage interoperability, enabling the practitioners to reason about reuse and/or customization of functionalities. The proposed approach is based on multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, optimizing three objectives, namely precision and recall of products denoted by an FM, and conformance with existing dependencies between microservices. MOEA4MBPL was evaluated with six microservices-based systems, using the algorithms NSGA-II and SPEA2. Our approach was capable of finding FMs with good trade-off values of precision and recall, satisfying all dependencies among the microservices. SPEA2 found better fronts of solutions than NSGA-II, but the latter always executed faster and could find single solutions closer to an ideal solution than the former.