The influence of architectural decisions on technical debt in microservice applications

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, while software industries are aiming to develop their software continuously, their delivery is hindered by technical debt.  Preventing technical debt would be valuable if it is considered in architectural decisions. On the other side, since microservices architecture is adaptable to build cloud applications and has other advantages, it has become a trend in the software industries. Due to the popularity of microservices and the importance of technical debt in the software industry, this research aims to find the influence of architectural decisions on technical debt in microservices applications. In this research, we explore architectural decisions in microservice applications and their qualities that impact technical debt.   We calculated the repetitiveness of selected microservices architectural decisions and the extra effort that they need to meet qualities to prevent technical debt. Spearman correlation coefficient used to calculate the relation between extra effort on the qualities of architectural decisions in microservice applications that affect technical debt. Furthermore, we calculated the correlation between the repetitiveness of selected architectural decisions and the effort for their qualities to find the effect of repetitiveness on qualities that reduce technical debt.   Our result shows that every architectural decision that we have explored for microservice applications needs some extra effort to increase the quality that can prevent technical debt. Correlation between qualities and repetitiveness of architectural decisions shows that weak correlation, which proves that increasing or decreasing of repetitiveness would not change the demand for extra effort to prevent technical debt.