Does microservice adoption impact the velocity? A cohort study
Saarimäki, Nyyti; Robredo, Mikel; Lenarduzzi, Valentina; Vegas, Sira; Juristo, Natalia; Taibi, Davide (2025-06-25)
Springer Science+Business Media
25.06.2025
Saarimäki, N., Robredo, M., Lenarduzzi, V. et al. Does microservice adoption impact the velocity? A cohort study. Empir Software Eng 30, 130 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-025-10673-7
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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-202507025046
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-202507025046
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
[Context] Microservices enable the decomposition of applications into small, independent, and connected services. The independence between services could positively affect a project’s velocity, which is considered an important maintenance metric measuring the time taken to implement features and fix bugs. However, no studies have investigated the causal relationship between microservices and velocity. [Objective and Method] The goal of this study is to investigate the effect of microservices on velocity which is a common maintenance metric. The study compares projects on GitHub developed with microservices style from the beginning and similar projects using monolithic architectures. The study was conducted as a retrospective cohort study, which is a study type used to assess causality. [Results] The results did not find statistically significant differences in mean velocities in microservice-based and monolithic projects. Furthermore, the statistical adjustment performed to quantify the statistical impact of the use of microservices on velocity considering additional confounders did not find statistically significant impact from these. [Conclusions] The results did not indicate a difference between microservices-based projects and monolithic projects in terms of velocity. In addition, this study will contribute to the body of knowledge of empirical methods and be among the first works to adopt the methodology of the cohort study.
[Context] Microservices enable the decomposition of applications into small, independent, and connected services. The independence between services could positively affect a project’s velocity, which is considered an important maintenance metric measuring the time taken to implement features and fix bugs. However, no studies have investigated the causal relationship between microservices and velocity. [Objective and Method] The goal of this study is to investigate the effect of microservices on velocity which is a common maintenance metric. The study compares projects on GitHub developed with microservices style from the beginning and similar projects using monolithic architectures. The study was conducted as a retrospective cohort study, which is a study type used to assess causality. [Results] The results did not find statistically significant differences in mean velocities in microservice-based and monolithic projects. Furthermore, the statistical adjustment performed to quantify the statistical impact of the use of microservices on velocity considering additional confounders did not find statistically significant impact from these. [Conclusions] The results did not indicate a difference between microservices-based projects and monolithic projects in terms of velocity. In addition, this study will contribute to the body of knowledge of empirical methods and be among the first works to adopt the methodology of the cohort study.
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