Limiting Technical Debt with Maintainability Assurance – An Industry Survey on Used Techniques and Differences with Service- and Microservice-Based Systems

Maintainability assurance techniques are used to control this quality attribute and limit the accumulation of potentially unknown technical debt. Since the industry state of practice and especially the handling of Service-and Microservice-Based Systems in this regard are not well covered in scientific literature, we created a survey to gather evidence for a) used processes, tools, and metrics in the industry, b) maintainability-related treatment of systems based on service-orientation, and c) influences on developer satisfaction w.r.t. maintainability. 60 software professionals responded to our online questionnaire. The results indicate that using explicit and systematic techniques has benefits for maintainability. The more sophisticated the applied methods the more satisfied participants were with the maintainability of their software while no link to a hindrance in productivity could be established. Other important findings were the absence of architecture-level evolvability control mechanisms as well as a significant neglect of service-oriented particularities for quality assurance. The results suggest that industry has to improve its quality control in these regards to avoid problems with long-living service-based software systems.