Research Opportunities in Microservices Quality Assessment: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

—The growth in the development of microservices has sparked interest in evaluating their quality. This study seeks to determine the key criteria and challenges in evaluating microservices to drive research and optimize processes. The systematic review of the literature presented in this research identified that the most commonly used evaluation criteria are performance, scalability, security, cohesion, coupling, and granularity. Although evaluation tools exist, they mainly measure performance aspects such as latency and resource consumption. Challenges were identified in security, granularity, throughput, monitoring, organizational strategy, orchestration, choreography, scalability, decomposition, and monolith refactoring. In addition, research opportunities in empirical studies, analysis of quality trade-offs, and broadening of relevant perspectives and tools are noted. Challenges in the interrelation of quality attributes, metrics and patterns, automatic evaluation, architectural decisions and technical debt, domain-based design, testing, monitoring, and performance modeling are also highlighted. Challenges in orchestration, communication management and consistency between microservices, independent evolution, and scalability are also mentioned. Therefore, it is critical to address these particular challenges in microservices and to continue research to improve the understanding and practices related to quality.