On Maintainability and Microservice Dependencies: How Do Changes Propagate?

Modern software systems evolve rapidly, especially when boosted by continuous integration and delivery. While many tools exist to help manage the maintainability of monolithic systems, gaps remain in assessing changes in decentralized systems, such as those based on microservices. Microservices fuel cloud-native systems, the mainstream direction for most enterprise solutions, which drives motivation for a broader understanding of how changes propagate through such systems. This position paper elaborates on the role of dependencies when dealing with evolution challenges in microservices aiming to support maintainability. It highlights the importance of dependency management in the context of maintainability deterioration. Our proposed perspective refines the approach to maintainability assurance by focusing on the systematic management of dependencies as a more direct method for addressing and understanding change propagation pathways, compared to traditional methods that often only address symptoms like anti-patterns, smells, metrics, or high-level concepts.