Attributes assessing the quality of microservices automatically decomposed from monolithic applications

The architectural styles in the world of software development are constantly evolving. Recently the microservice architecture is gaining more and more traction, building on concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and steering further away from monolithic architectures. Emerged from agile communities, the microservice oriented architecture implies a number of small-sized microservices independently deployable. The adoption of microservices as the base for creating enterprise applications is certain, yet many companies intend to migrate from the old monolithic style instead of creating new products mainly due to cost related implications as well as challenging and complex tasks. Several tools and approaches for the semi-automatic decomposition of monolithic applications to microservices have emerged, yet many of them still struggle to verify the result of such process, the architect being indispensable for assessing the output microservices. Although this area is intensely studied, no unanimously accepted and clear guidelines for defining a good microservice exist. This survey focuses on providing a comprehensive and broadly applicable set of quality assessment criteria for microservices resulted from semi-automatic migration tools or techniques. Our study aligns with industry requirements, including a case study which further validates our set of quality attributes. In the refinement step of the quality attributes set, the prospect of automating the process of validation is also discussed.