PF4MD: A Microservice Decomposition Tool Combining Problem Frames

Microservices have an important position in today's software development, enabling a highly cohesive and low-coupling way of service organization. To address the complexity issues of inter-service communication, data consistency and distributed system management in the microservice decomposition process, we extend the traditional problem diagram based on the commonality of microservice decomposition and problem frames: the causal domain in the problem domain is further divided into communication components and business components. We design a microservice decomposition tool PF4MD to visualize service requirements and design problem decomposition and complexity calculation rules. We evaluated it with cases such as the Smart Building system and obtained a strategy similar to manual decomposition but with more intuitive and finer granularity, thus helping architects to make more efficient decisions and understand the decomposition process more clearly in system requirements.