Linking Stakeholders' Viewpoint Concerns and Microservices-based Architecture

TL;DR

This paper proposes a structured method to connect enterprise stakeholders' concerns with microservices and APIs, enhancing alignment between business needs and technical architecture in agile, DevOps-driven environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel structured approach to link stakeholder viewpoints with microservices and APIs, improving enterprise-wide alignment and documentation.

Findings

Method effectively captures stakeholder needs across roles

Enhances traceability between business goals and microservices

Supports agile and DevOps practices with structured stakeholder linkage

Abstract

Widespread adoption of agile project management, independent delivery with microservices, and automated deployment with DevOps has tremendously speedup the systems development. The real game-changer is continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CD). Organizations can do multiple releases a day, shortening the test, release, and deployment cycles from weeks to minutes. Maturity of container technologies like Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes has promoted microservices architecture, especially in the cloud-native developments. Various tools are available for setting up CI/CD pipelines. Organizations are moving away from monolith applications and moving towards microservices-based architectures. Organizations can quickly accumulate hundreds of such microservices accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs). The primary purpose of these modern methodologies is agility, speed, and reusability. While DevOps offers speed and time to market, agility and reusability may not be guaranteed unless microservices and API's are linked to enterprise-wide stakeholders' needs. The link between business needs and microservices/APIs is not well captured nor adequately defined. In this publication, we describe a structured method to create a logical link among APIs and microservices-based agile developments with enterprise stakeholders' needs and viewpoint concerns. This method enables capturing and documenting enterprise-wide stakeholders' needs, whether these are business owners, planners (product owners, architects), designers (developers, DevOps engineers), or the partners and subscribers of an enterprise.