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Evaluation Criteria Catalog

In order to evaluate different technological approaches concerning the Saga pattern, some criteria have to be defined against which the evaluation can be performed. The following sections consider several areas of interest related to characteristics of microservices and the Saga pattern as well as some quality attributes of the ISO/IEC 25010 Quality Models1. For each area, the aspects that an evaluator should examine are explained and described. Some of the described criteria have been taken from the previous paper published by Dürr et al. [3]. The aim is to create a criteria catalog that can be used to analyze other technologies in this context.

Testability

Automatic testing helps to ensure and maintain software quality. Since Sagas are useful for implementing complex business workflows, being able to test Saga sequences improves quality, especially when adding new steps or participants.

In–house test framework

Examine whether the technology itself provides additional support for testing the Saga–related implementations. An example could be a provided DSL that helps testing Saga–related aspects of the technology.

Unit test Saga definition

To ensure that the Saga sequence is executed as expected, it is beneficial to test the definition automatically. Even more so, when the definition can be tested in isolation, so without having to really run the Saga with all its dependencies.

Unit test Saga participant

Investigating if the behaviour of a Saga participant can be tested in isolation, again without running the entire Saga.

Saga integration test

After analyzing the possibilities to test Saga–related implementations in isolation, the next step is to verify the interaction between the included components. Therefore, this criterion investigates if it is possible to test the execution of the entire Saga automatically.

References

[1] N. Alshuqayran, N. Ali, and R. Evans, "A Systematic Mapping Study in Microservice Architecture." IEEE Computer Society, 2016, pp. 44–51. [Online]. Available: https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SOCA.2016.15

[2] S. Newman, Building Microservices – Designing Fine–Grained Systems, 1st ed. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2015, ISBN: 9781491950357.

[3] K. Dürr, R. Lichtenthäler, and G. Wirtz, "An Evaluation of Saga Pattern Implementation Technologies," in Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Services and their Composition (ZEUS 2021), Bamberg, Germany, February 25–26, 2021, ser. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2839. CEUR-WS.org, 2021, pp. 74–82. [Online]. Available: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2839/paper12.pdf

[4] D. Cruz, T. Wieland, and A. Ziegler, "Evaluation Criteria for Free/Open Source Software Products Based on Project Analysis," Software Process: Improvement and Practice, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 107–122, 2006. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1002/spip.257

[5] J. P. Confino and P. A. Laplante, "An Open Source Software Evaluation Model," Int. J. Strateg. Inf. Technol. Appl., vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 60–77, 2010. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.4018/jsita.2010101505

[6] T. Cerny, M. J. Donahoo, and M. Trnka, "Contextual Understanding of Microservice Architecture: Current and Future Directions," ACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 29–45, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3183628.3183631

[7] O. Zimmermann, "Microservices Tenets," Computer Science – Research and Development, vol. 32, no. 3–4, pp. 301–310, 2016. [Online]. Available: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00450-016-0337-0

  1. https://iso25000.com/index.php/en/iso-25000-standards/iso-25010?start=0, last accessed 2021-07-06 ↩

Last update: 2022-02-15
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