Design principles, architectural smells and refactorings for microservices: A multivocal review
This work addresses the problem of maintaining microservice quality for developers and companies by consolidating existing knowledge, but it is incremental as it reviews rather than introduces new methods.
The paper systematically reviews literature to identify common architectural smells in microservices that violate design principles and discusses refactorings to resolve them, providing a comprehensive overview of recognized issues and solutions.
Potential benefits such as agile service delivery have led many companies to deliver their business capabilities through microservices. Bad smells are however always around the corner, as witnessed by the considerable body of literature discussing architectural smells that possibly violate the design principles of microservices. In this paper, we systematically review the white and grey literature on the topic, in order to identify the most recognised architectural smells for microservices and to discuss the architectural refactorings allowing to resolve them.