A qualitative comparison of specification techniques for microservice architectures

When designing and developing medium to large scale software systems, architectural decisions are important to get right. One architectural style is the microservices architecture (MSA). Describing and specifying one service or a monolith is well-defined in literature and in practice, however there are doubts on the optimal method of doing so when it comes to a complete MSA. Firstly, this research aims to identify existing techniques for designing and specifying MSAs by performing a systematic mapping study. Secondly, a classification scheme has been applied to perform a qualitative comparison of the found techniques that in turn is used to provide recommendations for business analysts, software architects and developers on which specification technique to use in what scenario.