Research On Software Maintainability Quality Model For Microservices Architecture

Software maintainability is one of the most important attributes of software quality,which reflects the difficulty of software maintenance.As the most time-consuming activity in software life cycle,maintenance consumes a lot of development effort.Timely and effective measurement of software maintainability can promote software design and reconstruction in maintenance,thus provide quick reaction to changing requirement and reduce maintenance costs.In recent years,microservices architecture has gained popularity in industry.Considering that using microservices architecture increases the complexity of understanding software system to a certain extent,enhancing maintainability is very important for microservices architecture.However,the current research on maintainability of microservices architecture is very limited.Although microservices architecture is originated from service-oriented architecture,there are some differences between them,such as decentralization,smaller service scale and technology heterogeneity.Therefore,the traditional research on maintainability of serviceoriented architecture can not be directly applied to microservices architecture.And the research on maintainability of service-oriented architecture often lacks effective theoretical verification,their rationality and effectiveness need to be further investigated.With these considerations,this thesis proposes a software maintainability quality model for microservices architecture,which incorporates 10 metrics to measure microservices maintainability from the perspective of four software attributes,namely scale,coupling,cohesion and complexity.And with regard to lacking theoretical verification in the current research,this thesis uses the property-based software engineering measurement framework to verify the proposed metrics and the rationality of the theory.Based on the proposed quality model,this thesis also designs and implements a prototype tool to automatically calculate the proposed maintainability metrics,which is easy to be expanded.Finally,this thesis uses an industrial project to validate the proposed quality model,and uses the multiple linear regression equation to calculate the goodness of fit between the proposed metrics and the maintenance cost of the software system.The measurement of maintenance cost is based on the number of bugs,the number of commits and the number of code change lines.The results of goodness of fit are 0.812,0.875 and 0.884,which confirm the validity of the proposed quality model.Additionally,this thesis further uses partial least square regression for modeling,which provides better explanation and generalization ability to the regression model.Therefore,using the proposed maintainability quality model can effectively evaluate the maintainability of microservices architecture,facilitating the design microservices architecture for higher quality software system.