Name
Integrating Issue Management Systems of Independently Developed Microservices
Date & Time
Friday, June 16, 2023, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Sandro Speth
Description

The microservice architectural style enables developing services independently from each other. However, this independence can result in problems when it comes to managing issues, such as bugs, as developer teams can freely choose their technology stacks, such as issue management systems (IMSs), e.g., Jira, GitHub, or Redmine. If an issue of a downstream microservice depends on an issue of an upstream microservice, this must be both identified and communicated, and the downstream service's issues should link to its causing issue. However, agile project management today requires efficient communication, which is why more and more teams are communicating through comments in the issues themselves. Unfortunately, IMSs are not integrated with each other, thus, semantically linking these issues is not supported, and identifying such issue dependencies from different IMSs is time-consuming and requires manual searching in multiple IMS technologies. This results in many context switches and prevents developers from being focused and getting things done. Therefore, in this paper, we present a concept for seamlessly integrating different IMS technologies into each other and providing a better architectural context. The concept is based on augmenting the websites of issue management systems through a browser extension. We validate the approach with a prototypical implementation for the Chrome browser. For evaluation, we conducted expert interviews, which approved that the presented approach provides significant advantages for managing issues of agile microservice architectures.

Location Name
Studio, 5th floor
Full Address
Pakhuis de Zwijger
Piet Heinkade 179
Amsterdam 1019 HC
Netherlands
Session Type
Research Paper
submissions_id
686
Track Color
Yellow
Session Length
20
Keywords
Microservices
Issue Management
Service Engineering
Component-based Architectures
Gropius
Browser Extension
Learning Objectives
Process innovation
General Topic
Process