This paper reports on our experience on developing the Box Analogy Technique (BoAT) an agile-based approach to extract business process models as part of the requirements elicitation phase. Business processes models have been established as an effective way of capturing and reasoning about organizational operational processes, and although having been used as part of requirements elicitation, their definition is a heavy process not aligned with agile principles. BoAT provides a complement for requirements gathering based on agile practices for process modelling combined with a cognitive-visual analogy focused on business view. The technique has been applied in three public and private organizations in a Brazilian state capital, and its artefacts have been compared against those obtained through a traditional interview technique. Results show that BoAT has indeed improved the communication with stakeholders, increasing the quality of the collected artefacts.

Abstract The reengineering of systems into a microservice-based architecture can be seen as an implementation of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, the deployment of SOA into an enterprise is a challenging task, as it may involve the modernization of mission-critical systems with high technical debt and high maintenance costs. To this end, a process is required to provide an appropriate set of steps and techniques that minimize risks and at the same time ensure the quality of the systems during the migration process. Thus, this work presents the Service-oriented Process for Reengineering and DevOps—SPReaD, an instantiation of the mainstream SOA methodology focusing on the reengineering of legacy systems integrating DevOps aspects for developing microservices systems. This process has been defined during a real software reengineering project of legacy systems from a Brazilian State Department of Taxation. The results obtained include a substantial improvement in the quality of the main taxation system used by the state, including not only code-related metrics but also performance improvements of the services offered, and a change in the methodology adopted by the software development team.