Analysis, Design, Test, and DevOps in Microservice-Based Software Architectures: Results from Pakistan

In today's software industry, Microservice-based Software Architecture (MSSA) has been a common practice and has been adopted by many companies. MSSA differs from traditional object-oriented architecture in several ways. The architecture moved away from being data-driven and evolved into a behavior-oriented structure. The usage of a single database is replaced by the structures in which each microservice is developed independently and has its own database. Therefore, adaptation demands software organizations to transform their culture. However, there is no de facto method for analyzing, designing, and testing systems for these architectures, similar to object-oriented analysis and design practices. This study aimed to understand how Pakistani software organizations undertake analysis, design, test, and DevOps processes in software projects adopting the MSSA paradigm. To achieve this goal, we surveyed 49 participants from various agile organizations in Pakistan, encompassing different roles and domains. The results reveal that Pakistani software organizations continue using familiar object-oriented analysis and design approaches. However, they have already started exploring event-oriented analysis and design methods for MSSA projects.