One Microservice per Developer: Is This the Trend in OSS?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether the common microservice development practice of assigning one microservice per developer is observed in open source projects, finding it is rarely followed except in projects with dedicated DevOps teams.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of open source microservice projects to assess the prevalence of the one-microservice-per-developer strategy.

Findings

Rarely observed in open source projects

More common in projects with dedicated DevOps teams

Supports microservice management practices in OSS

Abstract

When developing and managing microservice systems, practitioners suggest that each microservice should be owned by a particular team. In effect, there is only one team with the responsibility to manage a given service. Consequently, one developer should belong to only one team. This practice of "one-microservice-per-developer" is especially prevalent in large projects with an extensive development team. Based on the bazaar-style software development model of Open Source Projects, in which different programmers, like vendors at a bazaar, offer to help out developing different parts of the system, this article investigates whether we can observe the "one-microservice-per-developer" behavior, a strategy we assume anticipated within microservice based Open Source Projects. We conducted an empirical study among 38 microservice-based OS projects. Our findings indicate that the strategy is rarely respected by open-source developers except for projects that have dedicated DevOps teams.