Modernizing monolithic systems through microservices architectures (MSAs) promises significant benefits in terms of scalability, agility, and cloud adoption. However, this transition hinges on accurate and efficient microservices identification, a complex area of research still in its evolution. This systematic literature review delves into this challenge by exploring three critical questions: First, we examine how the field of microservices identification has evolved over time, analyzing publication trends, categorizing existing research, and mapping out different research objectives and methodologies employed. Second, we dive into the current state-of-the-art, showcasing cutting-edge methodologies and tools developed to address microservices identification challenges. We highlight promising approaches while identifying potential limitations. Third, we unveil both existing hurdles and future challenges in this domain, painting a comprehensive picture of the obstacles and opportunities that lie ahead. Our findings illuminate key areas demanding further attention, including the need for more automated and accurate identification tools, standardized evaluation benchmarks, and a deeper understanding of the human factors involved in successful transitions. By addressing these critical gaps, we aim to pave the way for smoother and more effective modernization of monolithic systems through microservices adoption.

Due to the cut throat competition among organizations, business process improvement is now an everyday activity. A relentless activity that makes business processes more complex than ever. As they get more complex, the improvement rounds become time-consuming, costly and the quality of each outcome is put into jeopardy, which is somehow paradoxical with the concept of improvement. In this paper, we propose a business process improvement technique based on ubiquitous computing. First, we couple business processes with ubiquitous computing and define a ubiquitous business process. Then, we explain how ubiquitous computing positively impacts the performance metrics of business processes. Afterwards, we set a specification for designing ubiquitous business processes by extending BPMN. Finally, we propose a concrete case study about time-banking to corroborate our theory. A comparative study of the same process, in ubiquitous and non-ubiquitous versions, is established. The results clearly illustrate that ubiquitous computing impacts positively the business process performance metrics. Still, the case study corroborates that ubiquitous computing not only improves a business process but also enables it to get improved with the least of human interventions.

The Microservice Architecture Style (MSA) has emerged as a significant computing paradigm in software engineering, with companies increasingly restructuring their monolithic systems to enhance digital performance and competitiveness. However, the migration process, particularly the microservice identification phase, presents complex challenges that require careful consideration. This study aimed to provide developers and researchers with a practical roadmap for microservice identification during legacy system migration while highlighting crucial migration steps and research requirements. Through a systematic mapping study following Kitchenham and Petersen’s guidelines, we analyzed various microservice identification approaches and developed a middleweight ontology that can be queried for key inputs, data modeling, identification algorithms, and performance evaluation metrics. Our research makes several significant contributions: a comprehensive analysis of existing identification methodologies, a multi-dimensional framework for categorizing and evaluating approaches, an examination of current research trajectories and literature gaps, an ontological framework specifically designed for microservice identification, and an outline of pressing challenges and future research directions. The study concluded that microservice identification remains a significant barrier in system migration efforts, highlighting the need for more research focused on developing effective identification techniques that consider various aspects, including roles and dependencies within a microservice architecture. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights for professionals and researchers working on microservice migration projects.

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables to connect physical world to digital processes, allowing real-world data to be fed into business processes. This revolution helps in the making of more informed business decisions as well as the automation and/or improvement of business processes tasks. The successful integration of IoT into business operations is required to realize these benefits. Supporting the modelling of IoT-enhanced business proccesess is the first step toward this goal. Despite the fact that numerous papers studied this topic, it is unclear what the current state of the art is in terms of modelling solutions and gaps. We conduct a systematic literature review in this work to determine how current solutions model IoT into business operations, and whether the standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has emerged as the de facto standard for business process modelling [20, 26]). The Object Management Group (OMG) developed BPMN, which is now an ISO standard BPMN is already enough for a full modelling of IoT integration, or the extensions are needed. We found and analysed the several existing alternative solutions after reviewing all the literature on this issue. Furthermore, we discuss some key aspects of the planned additions that should be addressed in the near future, such as the absence of standardization.