In this paper, we discuss the impact that technical debt (TD) may have on MSA regarding some quality attributes, like security, and hypothesise how self-adaptation could be useful in dealing with some aspects of TD

Chhonker, Ananya

de Lemos, Rogerio

Kent Academic Repository

Kent Academic RepositoryFull text document (pdf)Copyright & reuseContent in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated allcontent is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of researchThe version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.EnquiriesFor any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: researchsupport@kent.ac.ukIf you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.htmlCitation for published versionChhonker, Ananya and de Lemos, Rogerio  (2019) Microservices Architectures and TechnicalDebt: A Self-adaptation View.    In: International Conference on Microservices (Microservices2019), 19-21 February 2019, Dortmund, Germany.DOILink to record in KARhttps://kar.kent.ac.uk/73261/Document VersionAuthor's Accepted ManuscriptMicroservices Architectures and Technical Debt:A Self-adaptation ViewAnanya Chhonker and Roge´rio de LemosUniversity of Kent, UKRecognised benefits of microservice architectures (MSA) include increase in productivity,scalability and maintainability, with the overall goal of promoting easier deployment. However,the perceived complex nature of MSA may raise challenges related to data sharing, testing,security management, communication optimisation, and system performance [7]. These chal-lenges might lead to technical debt 1, which arises from design decisions that consciously orunconsciously compromise system-wide quality attributes.Since not much has been investigated regarding MSA in the context of technical debt [3],the goal of this work is to assess the impact of MSA into TD, and probe whether self-adaptioncan be seen as a solution to reducing TD of MSA-based software systems. Self-adaptationenables a system to modify their behaviour and/or structure in response to changes that occurto the system, its environment, or even its goals. MSA principles may be able to reducemaintenance and evolution cycles, however the same claim cannot be generalised towards otherquality attributes.The lack of primary or secondary studies analysing the principles of MSA in light of TD wasa motivating factor to modify the basis for selecting primary studies. In the approach taken,we have looked into key primary sources that summarises the state-of-the-art of TD and MSA,in order to identify correlations between these two fields regarding qualities attributes.Understanding TD in MSA is essential to make appropriate decisions when building softwaresystems either from scratch or refactoring an existing system. Either way, it is importantto properly decide the size, scope and the capabilities of MSA. Within these decisions it isimportant to agree on the type and acceptable level of TD intake. However, there are noguidelines or framework that can shed some light on the various reasons or key points toconsider while evaluating the debt capacity. This could lead to developers making assumptionsor making use of methods that could negatively affect an MSA-based software system duringits lifetime. As a consequence, software quality may be degraded, re-work costs increased, teamproductivity decreased, which would result in loss of business and gain of TD. However, if theteams have knowledge of challenges in MSA, and awareness of TD and its implications, theycould use this to their advantage and be more cautious while making decisions regarding MSA.Technical debt is sourced by leveraging the speed of releasing a software product againstits quality, so these, as the TD landscape illustrates, are two tightly linked concepts. Sincesoftware architecture is driven by the system quality attributes, it is at the architecture levelthat quality of attributes of an MSA should be analysed because of their potential to incur TD.It is recognised that a bad architecture is the most occurred and hardest TD to pay [6]. If anarchitecture is poorly build, the system will not only incur heavy TD but may fail completely.Therefore studying the characteristics of MSA can help measure the risk and the amount ofTD in a system.In our study, we have focused on some less studied, but yet important, MSA quality at-tributes [5] that can affect TD. In the following, we cover three of these attributes, namely,1Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor that is used to communicate the consequences of poor software devel-opment practices to non-technical stakeholders [1]Microservices Architectures and Technical Debt Chhonker and de Lemostestability, security and reliability, already in the context of existing self-adaptation solutionsthat can be ported to MSA. However, the support for self-adaption requires well reasoned ar-chitectural models to be manipulated at run-time, and this could be beneficial to mitigatingTD.Considering the continuous evolution of an MSA-based software system, testability becomesan important factor, particularly integration and regression testing. Integration testing can bechallenging in MSA, especially in a large system with a complex configuration. This can makeit difficult to test the component services, and anomalies associated with their collaborations.Self-adaptation is able to handle integration testing [4].Security is a major concern in MSA because of its distributed nature. MSA is exposed to anincreased surface attack area as the software application is broken down into component servicesthat communicate through APIs. Moreover, MSA promotes service reuse which is incrediblyuseful but equally risky because it can introduce vulnerabilities. Another factor is the fuzzyboundaries in MSA, which make it easy to break trust relationships. If a single componentservice is attacked it can compromise the whole MSA. System reconfiguration is a mechanismto self-protect the system against attacks [8].The distributed nature of MSA may also affect the overall reliability if redundancies are notproperly provided and managed since the failure of a component service may affect the reliabilityof the whole system. Communication over network brings extra complexity to the system, andit can also be a source of failure. Self-healing is a solution for managing redundancies thatsupport adaptation [2].In this paper, we briefly discussed the impact that technical debt (TD) may have on MSA re-garding some quality attributes, and hypothesise how self-adaptation could be useful in dealingwith some aspects of TD. The next step is to map some of these solutions into an MSA-basedsoftware system.References[1] W. N. Behutiye, P. Rodr´ıguez, M. Oivo, and A. Tosun. Analyzing the concept of technical debtin the context of agile software development: A systematic literature review. Information andSoftware Technology, 82:139 – 158, 2017.[2] J. Ca´mara, P. Correia, R. de Lemos, D. Garlan, P. Gomes, B. Schmerl, and R. Ventura. Incorporat-ing architecture-based self-adaptation into an adaptive industrial software system. J. Syst. Softw.,122(C):507–523, December 2016.[3] A. Chhonker. Impact of microservices architecture into technical debt: A systematic literaturereview. Master’s thesis, School of Computing, University of Kent, UK, 2018.[4] C. E. da Silva and R. de Lemos. Dynamic plans for integration testing of self-adaptive softwaresystems. In Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptiveand Self-Managing Systems, SEAMS ’11, pages 148–157, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.[5] P. D. Francesco, I. Malavolta, and P. Lago. Research on architecting microservices: Trends, fo-cus, and potential for industrial adoption. In 2017 IEEE International Conference on SoftwareArchitecture (ICSA), pages 21–30, April 2017.[6] Z. Li, P. Liang, and P. Avgeriou. Architectural technical debt identification based on architecturedecisions and change scenarios. In 12th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture,pages 65–74, May 2015.[7] J. Tho¨nes. Microservices. IEEE Software, 32(1):116–116, Jan 2015.[8] E. Yuan, S. Malek, B. Schmerl, D. Garlan, and J. Gennari. Architecture-based self-protectingsoftware systems. In Proceedings of the 9th International ACM Sigsoft Conference on Quality ofSoftware Architectures, QoSA ’13, pages 33–42, New York, NY, USA, 2013. ACM.2

Microservices Architectures and Technical Debt: A Self-adaptation View

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Microservices Architectures and Technical Debt: A Self-adaptation View

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