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There are numerous commercial tools and research prototypes that offer support for measuring technical debt. However, different tools adopt different terms, metrics, and ways to identify and measure technical debt. These tools offer diverse features, and their popularity / community support varies significantly. Therefore, (a) practitioners face difficulties when trying to select a tool matching their needs; and (b) the concept of technical debt and its role in software development is blurred. We attempt to clarify the situation by comparing the features and popularity of technical debt measurement tools, and analyzing the existing empirical evidence on their validity. Our findings can help practitioners to find the most suitable tool for their purposes, and researchers by highlighting the current tool shortcomings.

Architectural technical debt (ATD) may create a substantial extra effort in software development, which is called interest. There is little evidence about whether repaying ATD in microservices reduces such interest. Objectives: We wanted to conduct a first study on investigating the effect of removing ATD on the occurrence of incidents in a microservices architecture. Method: We conducted a quantitative and qualitative case study of a project with approximately 1000 microservices in a large, international financing services company. We measured and compared the number of software incidents of different categories before and after repaying ATD. Results: The total number of incidents was reduced by 84%, and the numbers of critical- and high-priority incidents were both reduced by approximately 90% after the architectural refactoring. The number of incidents in the architecture with the ATD was mainly constant over time, but we observed a slight increase of low priority incidents related to inaccessibility and the environment in the architecture without the ATD. Conclusion: This study shows evidence that refactoring ATDs, such as lack of communication standards, poor management of dead-letter queues, and the use of inadequate technologies in microservices, reduces the number of critical- and high-priority incidents and, thus, part of its interest, although some low priority incidents may increase.

Background: Using a microservices architecture is a popular strategy for software organizations to deliver value to their customers fast and continuously. However, scientific knowledge on how to manage architectural debt in microservices is scarce. Objectives: In the context of microservices applications, this paper aims to identify architectural technical debts (ATDs), their costs, and their most common solutions. Method: We conducted an exploratory multiple case study by conducting 25 interviews with practitioners working with microservices in seven large companies. Results: We found 16 ATD issues, their negative impact (interest), and common solutions to repay each debt together with the related costs (principal). Two examples of critical ATD issues found were the use of shared databases that, if not properly planned, leads to potential breaks on services every time the database schema changes and bad API designs, which leads to coupling among teams. We identified ATDs occurring in different domains and stages of development and created a map of the relationships among those debts. Conclusion: The findings may guide organizations in developing microservices systems that better manage and avoid architectural debts.

Using microservices is a way of supporting an agile architecture. However, if the microservices development is not properly managed, the teams’ development velocity may be affected, reducing agility and increasing architectural technical debt. This paper investigates how to manage the use of shared libraries in microservices to improve agility during development. We interviewed practitioners from four large international companies involved in microservices projects to identify problems when using shared libraries. Our results show that the participating companies had issues with shared libraries as follows: coupling among teams, delays on fixes due to overhead on libraries development teams, and need to maintain many versions of the libraries. Our results highlight that the use of shared libraries may hinder agility on microservices. Thus, their use should be restricted to situations where shared libraries cannot be replaced by a microservice and the costs of replicating the code on each service is very high.

Introduction: Software companies aim to achieve continuous delivery to constantly provide value to their customers. A popular strategy is to use microservices architecture. However, such an architecture is also subject to debt, which hinders the continuous delivery process and thus negatively affects the software released to the customers. Objectives: The aim of this study is to identify issues, solutions and risks related to Architecture Technical Debt in microservices. Method: We conducted an exploratory case study of a real life project with about 1000 services in a large, international company. Through qualitative analysis of documents and interviews, we investigated Architecture Technical Debt in the communication layer of a system with microservices architecture. Results: Our main contributions are a list of Architecture Technical Debt issues specific for the communication layer in a system with microservices architecture, as well as their associated negative impact (interest), a solution to repay the debt and the its cost (principal). Among the found Architecture Technical Debt issues were the existence of business logic in the communication layer and a high amount of point-to-point connections between services. The studied solution consists of the implementation of different canonical models specific to different domains, the removal of business logic from the communication layer, and migration from services to use the communication layer correctly. We also contributed with a list of possible risks that can affect the payment of the debt, as lack of funding and inadequate prioritization. Conclusion: We found issues, solutions and possible risks that are specific for microservices architectures not yet encountered in the current literature. Our results may be useful for practitioners that want to avoid or repay Technical Debt in their microservices architecture.

This article proposes to create and evaluate a software prototype that uses the idea of telemedicine to send an electronic medical record along with the patient's ECG, using tablets with Android as operating system and a 3G network, helping the specialist on his decisions on the emergency procedures, treatment and transport of the patient. This scenario sets the use of new technologies as an ally to help diagnosis at a distance.