Maintain multiple microservices without compromising the autonomy of Agile teams : Developing a strategy for increased productivity in maintenance of microservices

When adopting a microservice architecture, maintenance is needed to keep the system working. Maintenance can sometimes involve more than one team that needs to collaborate in order to fix a maintenance issue. This procedure requires coordination and correspondence between teams which can have a negative impact on the autonomy of the teams. The microservice architecture does not only introduce new benefits but also new challenges. This study creates a strategy guideline that organisations can use to address these challenges. The study highlights challenges with collaboration in maintenance and gives suggestions on strategies to use to counter the challenges. This guideline can help organisations new to the microservice architecture and help organisations to make future maintenance decisions in a microservice architecture with multiple teams. The guideline is developed using the Convergent Parallel Design and by interviewing product owners, architects, and developers in three organisations working with microservices. A survey was sent out to people working with microservices in different industries to validate the findings from the interviews. The interviews and the survey is analysed using the five steps described in the book “A Step-By-Step Guide To Qualitative Data Analysis” by O'Connor and Gibson (2003). This paper is focused on how agile teams collaborate with maintenance across microservices and does not cover teamwork within the agile team. This paper does not cover any technical aspects of microservices, such as application programming interface endpoints between services, but rather how teams work with them