Towards a UML Profile for Domain-Driven Design of Microservice Architectures

Domain-driven Design (DDD) is a model-driven approach to software development that focuses on capturing the application domain, its concepts and relationships in the form of domain models for architecture design. Among others, DDD provides modeling means for decomposing a domain into Bounded Contexts and expressing the relationships between them. With the recent emergence of Microservice Architecture (MSA), DDD again gains broad attention because a Bounded Context naturally maps to a Microservice, which enables the application of DDD for MSA design. However, DDD is not a formal modeling language. Instead, it leverages informal UML class diagrams to express domain models, which prevents model validation and transformation. In this paper we address this limitation by providing an initial UML profile for Domain-driven MSA Modeling. Together with a survey on the UML constructs used in DDD, the profile denotes a foundation for validating domain models and deriving Microservice code from them.