Towards a practical maintainability quality model for service-and microservice-based systems

Abstract

Although current literature mentions a lot of different metrics related to the maintainability of Service-based Systems (SBSs), there is no comprehensive quality model (QM) with automatic evaluation and practical focus. To fill this gap, we propose a Maintainability Model for Services (MM4S), a layered maintainability QM consisting of Service Properties (SPs) related with automatically collectable Service Metrics (SMs). This research artifact created within an ongoing Design Science Research (DSR) project is the first version ready for detailed evaluation and critical feedback. The goal of MM4S is to serve as a simple and practical tool for basic maintainability estimation and control in the context of SBSs and their specialization Microservice-based Systems (μSBSs).