Addressing Expressiveness for a UML Microservices-Based Modeling within the Life Cycle of the Ubiquitous System Development

Microservices architectures are presented as the next evolution of the software design. They are particularly applied to scalable and distributed systems, such as IoT (Internet of Things). However, in order to take advantage of the microservices-based design for ubiquitous systems and manage its implications in other phases of the development life cycle there is still a need to address expressiveness in the modelling languages, such as UML. This paper identifies some of the main UML language elements to be extended and/or specialized in order to facilitate the design of microservices-based software for ubiquitous systems. The case study case of an intelligent system to check attendance in a ubiquitous learning environment is used as a way of identifying those UML elements. As a result, this work lays the ground to model affinity between microservices at the design level and generate code and other software artifacts. In the next future, it can also contribute to better automatize software development for microservice-based systems by applying a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) methodology.