Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Stocker, Mirko
• Zimmermann, Olaf

Titel

From Code Refactoring to API Refactoring: Agile Service Design and Evolution

Ist Teil von

• Service-Oriented Computing, p.174-193

Ort / Verlag

Cham: Springer International Publishing

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Refactoring is an essential agile practice; microservices are a currently trending implementation approach for service-oriented architectures. While program-internal code refactoring is well established, refactoring components on the architectural level has been researched but not adopted widely in practice yet. Hence, refactoring service Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is not understood well to date. As a consequence, practitioners struggle with the evolution of APIs exposed by microservices. To overcome this problem, we propose to switch the refactoring perspective from implementation to integration and study how refactorings can be applied to the problem domain of agile service API design and evolution. We start with an empirical analysis and assessment of the state of the art and the practice. The contributions of this paper then are: 1) presentation of results from a practitioner survey on API change and evolution, 2) definitions for a future practice of API refactoring and 3) a candidate catalog of such API refactorings. We discuss these contributions and propose a research action plan as well.