Abstract
An application framework is a reusable “skeleton” application that can be specialized to develop custom applications. As microservices become more popular in the software industry, the importance of methodologies for designing microservices-oriented frameworks is increasing. However, the existing methodologies for designing application frameworks, which were developed for the monolithic environment, do not fit the microservice architecture well. To address this issue, this study extends Schmid's systematic generalization approach to enable the design of microservice-oriented application frameworks. The methodology introduces communication spots, which define the execution orders among services, and communication styles, which define the communication relationship among services, to capture the communication characteristics in microservice environments. The methodology also proposes the approaches in microservice generalization and the usage of integration patterns in transforming a microservice-oriented application into a microservice-oriented framework. The new methodology can facilitate a developer to systematically design a microservice-oriented application framework by generalizing from a microservice application. A case study is used to demonstrate how to apply the proposed methodology to design a microservice fraud-detection framework.