Abstract
Microservice-based systems promote agility and rapid business development. Some features, such as fast time-to-market, scalability and optimal response times, have encouraged stakeholders to get more involved in the development and implementation of microservices architectures in order to translate their business vision into the implementation of the architecture. Although some techniques allow the inclusion of the stakeholders' perspective in the design of microservice architectures, few proposals consider such perspectives in the selection and evaluation of technologies that implement microservice architectures. Indeed, the qualities that characterize microservice-based systems strongly depend on the suitable selection of technologies, such as application frameworks and platforms. This article proposes a collaborative technique that includes stakeholders and software architects in the selection and evaluation of application frameworks and platforms to implement microservice-based systems. We evaluated the technique in an industrial case of design and implementation of an Ambient-Assisted Living (AAL) system, which combines microservice architecture and Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) sensors. The case results indicate that the proposed technique supported stakeholders in the pragmatic evaluation of alternative technological solutions. Additionally, it allowed the implementation of an AAL system that satisfies the quality specifications of stakeholders and end-users. This initial study suggests that actively including stakeholders in the implementation of microservice-based systems allows architects to make design decisions that better consider stakeholders viewpoints as well as managing their expectations.
Highlights
People and organizations interested in a system are commonly defined as stakeholders
We evaluated our proposal in an Ambient Assisted Living system that uses Internet-ofMedical-Things (IoMT) and microservice architecture
Properties allow the architect to focus on particular perspectives of an quality attributes requirements (QARs) rather than analyzing it as a whole
Summary
People and organizations interested in a system are commonly defined as stakeholders. Depending on the context in which the system is involved, these needs encompass different types and levels of concerns In this regard, some studies (such as [2] and [3]) have investigated the role of stakeholders regarding decision making in software development. One of the main issues we know about this regard is a lack of techniques to involve stakeholders in decision-making about selecting technological tools (such as frameworks and platforms) to develop and implement microservice-based systems. The technique extends μAzimut, a technique that uses architectural knowledge to support architects in the analysis, evaluation, and comparison of technologies (represented by framework and platforms) to satisfy QARs in microservice-based systems [13]. This article is organized as follows: Section II contextualizes the problem addressed in our research; Section III describes the related work; Section IV introduces μAzimut; Section V describes our technique; Section VI details the case study; Section VII discusses the threats to validity; and Section VIII concludes the article and describes future work
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