An exploratory study on the effects of event-driven architecture on software modularity

TL;DR

This study empirically compares event-driven architecture and REST in terms of software modularity, revealing that event-driven architecture improves separation of concerns but may increase coupling, cohesion, complexity, and size.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical comparison of event-driven architecture and REST regarding modularity in real-world applications.

Findings

Event-driven architecture improves separation of concerns.

REST outperforms in coupling, cohesion, complexity, and size metrics.

Results serve as a foundation for further empirical studies.

Abstract

Event-driven architecture has been widely adopted in the software industry, emerging as an alternative to the development of enterprise applications based on the REST architectural style. However, little is known about the effects of event-driven architecture on modularity while enterprise applications evolve. Consequently, practitioners end up adopting it without any empirical evidence about its impacts on essential indicators, including separation of concerns, coupling, cohesion, complexity and size. This article, therefore, reports an exploratory study comparing event-driven architecture and REST style in terms of modularity. A real-world application was developed using an event-driven architecture and REST through five evolution scenarios. In each scenario, a feature was added. The generated versions were compared using ten metrics. The initial results suggest that the event-driven architecture improved the separation of concerns, but was outperformed considering the metrics of coupling, cohesion, complexity and size. The findings are encouraging and can be seen as a first step in a more ambitious agenda to empirically evaluate the benefits of event-driven architecture against the REST style.