Identifying architectural technical debt, principal, and interest in microservices: A multiple-case study

Toledo, Saulo Soares de; Martini, Antonio; Sjøberg, Dag I. K.

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2021.110968

Cited by 23 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…One of the major differences it mentioned was that services are brought to production independently of each other in a microservice architecture, whereas this is not the case with most SOA solutions. Toledo et al [63] begins by comparing SOA and microservice architectures. For example, there are concepts and techniques from microservice architecture that were borrowed from SOA, such as scalability.…”

Section: Architectural Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another goal commonly found in papers is identifying and resolving cases of technical debt, the extra work that results from choosing a sub-optimal solution. Toledo et al [63] propose techniques to assist in detecting and solving cases of architectural, technical debt across different stages of development in microservice-based applications through a survey of employees at companies who work with microservices. The paper by Pigazzini et al [29] defines a detection strategy for known code smells that degrade the development of a system, such as shared persistence, hardcoded endpoints, and cyclic dependency.…”

Section: Technical Debt Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Walker et al [27,28], and Pigazzini et al [29] take this further and propose methods of automatically detecting selected microservice antipatterns or code smells using staticcode analysis. Works identifying technical debt are also closely related to the concept of antipatterns, and the surveys performed by Bogner et al [65] and Toledo et al [63] and the solutions they proposed show promise for preventing technical debt from crippling microservice evolution. Soldani et al developed a tool, µTOSCA, to identify and resolve architectural smells [22].…”

Section: Microservice Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several works seek to describe the state of the art and state of practice regarding microservices and their analysis. Both Toledo et al [63] and Auer et al [64] have conducted surveys for this purpose, with the former survey conducted among employees working with microservices to determine the most critical architectural technical debts, and the latter conducted among developers to create an assessment framework on whether or not a system should make the switch from monolithic to microservice-based architecture. Cerny et al [14] conducted a survey as well, focused on determining whether traditional static-code analysis is fit for use in the microservice architecture.…”

Section: Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Identifying or resolving technical debt in a microservice architecture [29,39,63] is an interesting research direction of significant impact. We expect this specific research to grow significantly in the next few years as consequences of system evolution impact the operational budget.…”

Section: Rq2: Goals Addressed By the Papersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On Microservice Analysis and Architecture Evolution: A Systematic Mapping Study

et al. 2021

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Microservice architecture has become the leading design for cloud-native systems. The highly decentralized approach to software development consists of relatively independent services, which provides benefits such as faster deployment cycles, better scalability, and good separation of concerns among services. With this new architecture, one can naturally expect a broad range of advancements and simplifications over legacy systems. However, microservice system design remains challenging, as it is still difficult for engineers to understand the system module boundaries. Thus, understanding and explaining the microservice systems might not be as easy as initially thought. This study aims to classify recently published approaches and techniques to analyze microservice systems. It also looks at the evolutionary perspective of such systems and their analysis. Furthermore, the identified approaches target various challenges and goals, which this study analyzed. Thus, it provides the reader with a roadmap to the discipline, tools, techniques, and open challenges for future work. It provides a guide towards choices when aiming for analyzing cloud-native systems. The results indicate five analytical approaches commonly used in the literature, possibly in combination, towards problems classified into seven categories.

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Section: Architectural Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Technical Debt Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Microservice Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rq2: Goals Addressed By the Papersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On Microservice Analysis and Architecture Evolution: A Systematic Mapping Study

et al. 2021

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Impacts, causes, and solutions of architectural smells in microservices: An industrial investigation

et al. 2022

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As a recently predominant architecture style, MicroService Architecture (MSA) is likely to suffer the issues of poor maintainability due to inappropriate microservice boundaries. Architectural Smell (AS), as a metaphor for potential architectural issues that may have negative impacts on software maintenance, can be used to pinpoint refactoring opportunity for evolving microservice boundary. However, existing studies mostly focus on AS detection with little further investigation on the possible impacts, causes, and solutions of AS, which does little help in addressing the bad smells in architecture. Our goal in this study is to bridge this gap by investigating the possible impacts, causes, and solutions of AS in MSA-based systems. An industrial case study is carried out to collect repository data and practitioners' views on six typical ASes in a real MSA-based telecommunication system. Statistical Analysis and Coding techniques are used in the analyses of quantitative and qualitative data respectively.The results show that AS influences the modularity, modifiability, analyzability, and testability of the MSA-based system, which further induce extra cross-team communication, change-and fault-prone microservices. To explore the causes for AS, a five-aspect conceptual classification with technology, project, organization, business, and professional is proposed, in which the business and organization aspects take the major roles. Both technical and non-technical solutions are distilled to deal with ASes despite potential constraints. These results and their comparison to current literature are discussed, which provide practical implications in coping with AS in microservices.

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A Bird’s Eye View of Microservice Architecture from the Lens of Cloud Computing

Vaniyawala,

Pandey

2024

Communications in Computer and Information Science

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Identifying architectural technical debt, principal, and interest in microservices: A multiple-case study

Cited by 23 publications

References 13 publications

On Microservice Analysis and Architecture Evolution: A Systematic Mapping Study

On Microservice Analysis and Architecture Evolution: A Systematic Mapping Study

Impacts, causes, and solutions of architectural smells in microservices: An industrial investigation

A Bird’s Eye View of Microservice Architecture from the Lens of Cloud Computing

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