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Improving Comprehensibility of Event-Driven Microservice Architectures by Graph-Based Visualizations

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14889))

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Abstract

This paper presents an industrial case study examining challenges faced by software architects and developers during planning and assessing the correctness of event-driven communication behaviour. We present a novel approach for visualizing the communication paths of an event-driven microservice system. Service-local documentation is used to create a global view of the runtime behaviour. We show that this visualization approach can significantly reduce the time required to understand an architecture, while additionally improving accuracy and confidence.

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Data Availability Statement

The anonymized protocols from our initial interviews and the raw data from the evaluation are available for download (https://zenodo.org/records/12519817). The service-local documentations of events which is used to evaluate our visualization and the source code of our visualization is proprietary information and not publicly available.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Sven Schoop & Thomas Franz

  2. Ausbildung.de GmbH, Bochum, Germany

    Sven Schoop & Erik Hebisch

Authors
  1. Sven Schoop
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  2. Erik Hebisch
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  3. Thomas Franz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sven Schoop .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Matthias Galster

  2. University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Patrizia Scandurra

  3. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Tommi Mikkonen

  4. Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Pablo Oliveira Antonino

  5. University of São Paulo, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil

    Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

  6. University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain

    Elena Navarro

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Disclosure of Interests

Authors A and B are employed by the company that develops and maintains the system and team studied.

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Schoop, S., Hebisch, E., Franz, T. (2024). Improving Comprehensibility of Event-Driven Microservice Architectures by Graph-Based Visualizations. In: Galster, M., Scandurra, P., Mikkonen, T., Oliveira Antonino, P., Nakagawa, E.Y., Navarro, E. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14889. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70797-1_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70797-1_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-70796-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-70797-1

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