Cloud-Native Architectural Characteristics and their Impacts on Software Quality: A Validation Survey

TL;DR

This paper investigates how architectural characteristics of cloud-native applications impact software quality, validating and updating a quality model through a survey of professionals to guide better design and development practices.

Contribution

It presents a validated and revised quality model for cloud-native architectures, supported by survey data, and introduces a survey tool for assessing complex quality structures.

Findings

Survey supports the quality model to a fair extent

Identifies parts of the model needing revision

Provides a survey tool for complex quality assessments

Abstract

Cloud-native architectures are often based on microservices and combine different aspects that aim to leverage the capabilities of cloud platforms for software development. Cloud-native architectural characteristics like patterns and best practices aim to design, develop, deploy, and operate such systems efficiently with minimal time and effort. However, architects and developers are faced with the challenge of applying such characteristics in a targeted manner to improve selected quality attributes. Hence, we aim to investigate relationships, or more specifically impacts, between architectural characteristics of cloud-native applications, and quality aspects. The architectural characteristics in consideration are based on our recently proposed quality model for cloud-native software architectures. To validate its elements and revise this literature-based quality model, we conducted a questionnaire-based survey among 42 software professionals. While the survey results reinforce the quality model to a fair extent, they also indicate parts requiring a revision. Thus, as an additional contribution, we present an updated version of the quality model incorporating the survey results. Practitioners will benefit from our work when designing and developing cloud-native applications in a quality-oriented way. Researchers will moreover profit from our specifically developed questionnaire-based survey tool, which allows surveying complex structures like a hierarchical quality model.