Towards Change Impact Analysis in Microservices-based System Evolution

Abstract: Cloud-native systems are the mainstream for enterprise solutions, given their scalability, resilience, and other benefits. While the benefits of cloud-native systems fueled by microservices are known, less guidance exists on their evolution. One could assume that since microservices encapsulate their code, code changes remain encapsulated as well; however, the community is becoming more aware of the possible consequences of code change propagation across microservices. Moreover, an active mitigation instrument for negative consequences of change propagation across microservices (i.e., ripple effect) is yet missing, but the microservice community would greatly benefit from it. This paper introduces what it could look like to have an infrastructure to assist with change impact analysis across the entire microservice system and intends to facilitate advancements in laying out the foundations and building guidelines on microservice system evolution. It shares a new direction for incremental software architecture reconstruction that could serve as the infrastructure concept and demonstrates early results from prototyping to illustrate the potential impact.