Size measurement and effort estimation in microservicebased projects: Results from Pakistan

Abstract

During the last decade, microservice-based software architecture has been a common design paradigm in the industry and has been successfully utilized by organizations. Microservice-based software architecture, specifically in the form of reactive systems, has substantial differences from the more conventional design paradigms, such as the object-oriented paradigm. 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. In this study, we aimed to get an insight into how Pakistani software organizations perform size measurement and effort estimation in their software projects which embrace the microservice-based software architecture paradigm. For this purpose, we surveyed 49 Pakistani participants from different agile organizations over different roles and domains to collect information on their experience in microservice-based projects. Our results reveal that although Pakistani organizations face challenges, they continue using familiar subjective size measurement and effort estimation approaches that they have used for traditional architectures. © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors.