Semi-automated Cross-Component Issue Management and Impact Analysis

Despite microservices and other component-based architecture styles being state of the art in research for many years by now, issue management across the boundaries of a single component is still challenging. Components that were developed independently and can be used independently are joined together in the overall architecture, which results in dependencies between those components. Due to these dependencies, bugs can result that propagate along the call chains through the architecture. Other types of issues, such as the violation of non-functional quality properties, can also impact other components. However, traditional issue management systems end at the boundaries of a component, making tracking of issues across different components time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, a need for automation arises for cross-component issue management, which automatically puts issues of the independent components in the correct mutual context, creating new cross-component issues and syncing cross-component issues between different components. This automation could enable developers to manage issues across components as efficiently as possible and increases the system’s quality. To solve this problem, we propose an initial approach for semi-automated cross-component issue management in conjunction with service-level objectives based on our Gropius system. For example, relationships between issues of the same or different components can be predicted using classification to identify dependencies of issues across component boundaries. In addition, we are developing a system to model, monitor and alert service-level objectives. Based on this, the impact of such quality violations on the overall system and the business process will be analysed and explained through cross-component issues.