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Reducing Incidents in Microservices by Repaying Architectural Technical Debt

Reducing Incidents in Microservices by Repaying Architectural Technical Debt

Authors :
Dag I. K. Sjøberg
Johannes Skov Frandsen
Antonio Martini
Saulo Soares de Toledo
Agata Przybyszewska
Source :
SEAA
Publication Year :
2021
Publisher :
IEEE, 2021.

Abstract

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.

Details

ISBN :
978-1-66542-705-0
ISBNs :
9781665427050
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....b11b499dca0e61fa06f10cbda619c8f0
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1109/seaa53835.2021.00033