Exploring microservice ownership and organizational coupling in open-source projects: an empirical study
Li, Xiaozhou; d’Aragona, Dario Amoroso; Cerny, Tomas; Lenarduzzi, Valentina; Taibi, Davide; Janes, Andrea (2025-04-01)
Springer
01.04.2025
Li, X., d’Aragona, D.A., Cerny, T. et al. Exploring microservice ownership and organizational coupling in open-source projects: an empirical study. Computing 107, 102 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-025-01454-7.
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© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-202504142585
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-202504142585
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
Together with the rising popularity of microservices, practitioners have started to pay more attention to the longevity and sustainability of microservices on the organizational level. Many argue—supported by Conway’s Law—that each microservice should be owned by a specific team or individual developer, although each team or developer may only contribute to a maximum of one microservice. With such a “one microservice per team/developer” strategy, the architecture shall be better maintained in a fashion of “high cohesion, low coupling”, which is a recommended setting for modular software systems. However, it is difficult to achieve such ideal circumstances when the coupling phenomena commonly exist therein, which are caused by cross-service calls and dependencies in microservice-based systems. Especially besides the couplings in functions and modules latent in the source code, it is also noticeable that the microservice project teams can suffer from high coupling issues regarding their cross-service contribution. Such an issue on the organizational level can inevitably result in technical debt and high managerial costs, which need to be detected and mitigated in time to prevent future losses. In this paper, we investigate the existence of the recommended “one microservice per team/developer” setting via an empirical study on 38 microservice-based open-sourced projects together with the different developer roles who are in charge of single or multiple microservices. Furthermore, by taking into account microservice ownership and cross-service contribution, we also investigate the organizational coupling of these projects and the developer roles that contribute to such couplings. The results show that it is rare that such “one microservice per team/developer” phenomenon exists in microservice projects, while the couplings are majorly caused by the leaders and major contributors of the microservices.
Together with the rising popularity of microservices, practitioners have started to pay more attention to the longevity and sustainability of microservices on the organizational level. Many argue—supported by Conway’s Law—that each microservice should be owned by a specific team or individual developer, although each team or developer may only contribute to a maximum of one microservice. With such a “one microservice per team/developer” strategy, the architecture shall be better maintained in a fashion of “high cohesion, low coupling”, which is a recommended setting for modular software systems. However, it is difficult to achieve such ideal circumstances when the coupling phenomena commonly exist therein, which are caused by cross-service calls and dependencies in microservice-based systems. Especially besides the couplings in functions and modules latent in the source code, it is also noticeable that the microservice project teams can suffer from high coupling issues regarding their cross-service contribution. Such an issue on the organizational level can inevitably result in technical debt and high managerial costs, which need to be detected and mitigated in time to prevent future losses. In this paper, we investigate the existence of the recommended “one microservice per team/developer” setting via an empirical study on 38 microservice-based open-sourced projects together with the different developer roles who are in charge of single or multiple microservices. Furthermore, by taking into account microservice ownership and cross-service contribution, we also investigate the organizational coupling of these projects and the developer roles that contribute to such couplings. The results show that it is rare that such “one microservice per team/developer” phenomenon exists in microservice projects, while the couplings are majorly caused by the leaders and major contributors of the microservices.
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