One Microservice per Developer: Is This the Trend in OSS?

Abstract: When developing and managing microservice systems, practitioners suggest that each microservice should be owned by a particular team. In effect, there is only one team with the responsibility to manage a given service. Consequently, one developer should belong to only one team. This practice of "one-microservice-per-developer" is especially prevalent in large projects with an extensive development team. Based on the bazaar-style software development model of Open Source Projects, in which different programmers, like vendors at a bazaar, offer to help out developing different parts of the system, this article investigates whether we can observe the "one-microservice-per-developer" behavior, a strategy we assume anticipated within microservice based Open Source Projects. We conducted an empirical study among 38 microservice-based OS projects. Our findings indicate that the strategy is rarely respected by open-source developers except for projects that have dedicated DevOps teams.