Refactoring of a Microservices Project Driven by Architectural Smell Detection

The development of microservice projects and the migration towards microservice architecture have been widely adopted during the last few years in the industry and studied in the academy. The evaluation of the quality and the technical debt of these projects can be done by considering different features, such as, for example, the detection of architectural smells, a well-known source of architectural debt. In this paper, we describe our experience on the analysis of an industrial microservice project through the detection of several kinds of architectural smells. The goal of the paper is to outline how architectural smells detection can be used to evaluate the architectural debt of a microservices project and to analyze the possible impact of smell refactoring on the identification of new microservices together with their ripple effects on other smells.