Abstract
Microservice Architecture (MSA) describes an increasingly popular architectural style in which business capabilities are wrapped into autonomously developable and deployable software units known as microservices. Following Conway’s Law, the corresponding microservice development process (MDP) requires a distinct accountable team for each microservice to facilitate service autonomy. Although there are best practices for larger enterprises to take this organizational requirement into account, there is currently a lack of empirically founded understanding, how the adaptation of MSA in smaller organizations that have more constraint resources can be successful. Therefore, we have conducted an interview study comprising six cases of such small to medium-sized development organizations (SMDOs) in which we explore their applied MDP using the Grounded Theory methodology. Among others, we examined team composition, collaboration formats, technology, and central challenges. Our results show that in most of the studied cases, shifts of service ownership occur and most use a code-first approach neglecting documentation. Based on our observations, we assume that SMDOs in particular are threatened to contradict service independence. Overall, our exploratory results provide starting points for further research in the field of microservice development.
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Sorgalla, J., Sachweh, S., Zündorf, A. (2020). Exploring the Microservice Development Process in Small and Medium-Sized Organizations. In: Morisio, M., Torchiano, M., Jedlitschka, A. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12562. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64148-1_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64148-1_28
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