Analyzing Organizational Structure of Microservice Projects based on Contributor Collaboration

Abstract

Software system quality is strongly affected by the organizational structure and collaboration across developers. Effective and loosely coupled organization structures reflect the high quality of the system architecture and the efficiency with which this system can evolve. Especially for microservice-based systems, as the notion of 'one-microservice-per-team' is highly recommended and advocated as one of the best practices in the industry, it is crucial for the companies to be aware of the status of their organizational structure and the critical contributors therein. To such an end, this paper proposes an approach to analyze the organizational structure of microservice-based software projects in terms of contributor collaboration and to identify the core contributors therein. Furthermore, we can also monitor the evolution of the project's organizational structure via the growing collaboration activities through different releases. The proposed method shall help the companies and organizations adopting microservices better understand their organizational structure and make more effective decisions in maintaining the quality of microservice architectures.