Month: August 2021

Design, Monitoring, and Testing of Microservices Systems: The Practitioners’ Perspective

We conducted a mixed-methods study with 106 survey responses and 6 interviews from microservices practitioners. The main findings are: (1) a combination of domain-driven design and business capability is the most used strategy to decompose an application into microservices, (2) over half of the participants used architecture evaluation and architecture implementation when designing microservices systems, (3) API gateway and Backend for frontend patterns are the most used MSA patterns, (4) resource usage and load balancing as monitoring metrics, log management and exception tracking as monitoring practices are widely used, (5) unit and end- to-end testing are the most used testing strategies, and (6) the complexity of microservices systems poses challenges for their design, monitoring, and testing, for which there are no dedicated solutions.

This study will be published in the Journal of Systems and Software. Pre-print available here

Evaluating Dissemination and Implementation Strategies to Develop Clinical Software

We know that building software presents several challenges. But, in healthcare, these challenges can be increased by the complexity of clinical processes. In an article presented at SEH@ICSE, we presented a study exploring the opinions of clinicians regarding clinical software. This software was built using a methodology that involves stakeholders and clinicians along with implementation and dissemination strategies used in healthcare. These strategies were key to engaging clinicians in software development. The results obtained indicate that the software studied has a high acceptance by clinicians because it operationalizes the clinical activities demanded by clinicians in a timely and seamless manner in clinical processes.