Business

Microservices

Cloud computing

Operating system

Code refactoring

Software

Computer science

Debt

Finance

Technical debt

Software development

Journal of Systems and Software

The migration from a monolithic system to microservices requires a deep refactoring of the system. Therefore, such a migration usually has a big economic impact and companies tend to postpone several activities during this process, mainly to speed up the migration itself, but also because of the demand for releasing new features. We monitored the technical debt of an SME while it migrated from a legacy monolithic system to an ecosystem of microservices. Our goal was to analyze changes in the code technical debt before and after the migration to microservices. We conducted a case study analyzing more than four years of the history of a twelve-year-old project (280K Lines of Code) where two teams extracted five business processes from the monolithic system as microservices. For the study, we first analyzed the technical debt with SonarQube and then performed a qualitative study with company members to understand the perceived quality of the system and the motivation for possibly postponed activities. The migrat...

Does migrating a monolithic system to microservices decrease the technical debt?