Toward Collaboration Optimization in Microservice Projects Based on Developer Personalities

Due to the growing popularity of microservice architecture, researchers and practitioners are beginning to pay increasing attention to its longevity and sustainability. One critical aspect is the influence of the software organizational structure on the maintainability of the microservice architecture. Many practitioners advocate that it is important to adopt a strategy that allows each team to take responsibility for no more than one microservice, which can greatly reduce coupling on the organizational level and improve the efficiency of collaboration and communication therein. However, such a strategy is not commonly applied when organizational coupling exists nearly universally amongst projects. To improve such a situation, it is critical to optimize the developers' collaboration toward proper allocation of developers' responsibility and reduce ineffective communication. To this end, one aspect that should be taken into account is the personality of the developers when developers of compatible personalities are more effective in collaborating compared to those who are not. In this vision paper, we propose a framework for the optimization of microservice organizations considering the personality of the developer as one of the contextual factors. The framework shall facilitate the optimization of the organizational structure of microservices toward not only the ideal “high cohesion, low coupling”, but also the high”personality compatibility” in highly cohesive teams.