Survey on Requirement-Driven Microservice System Evolution

In software engineering research, software evolution is always a hot focus. A dominating driving force of software evolution is requirement changes (RCs). In this paper, we make a comprehensive survey on start-of-the-art progress of requirement-driven software evolution, especially aiming at microservice-based software systems (MSS). MSS has become a dominating architecture style for modern software because of its advantage on agile DevOps and superior supports on business agility, thus it has been proved to outperform other architecture styles on fitting for requirement changes. A high-level conceptual framework for requirement-driven MSS evolution is demonstrated first, then related work are surveyed in terms of sources, representations and types of RCs, approaches for capturing RCs and mapping them to MSS evolution, and various techniques for MSS evolution in microservice, architecture, and infrastructure levels, respectively. Limitations of existing works are discussed and potential research topics are listed for reference. An integrated platform supporting full-lifecycle requirement-driven MSS evolution is introduced at last. We do hope this survey would help researchers strive for deep insights in this topic.