Improving Comprehensibility of Event-Driven Microservice Architectures by Graph-Based Visualizations

This paper presents an industrial case study examining challenges faced by software architects and developers during planning and assessing the correctness of event-driven communication behaviour. We present a novel approach for visualizing the communication paths of an event-driven microservice system. Service-local documentation is used to create a global view of the runtime behaviour. We show that this visualization approach can significantly reduce the time required to understand an architecture, while additionally improving accuracy and confidence.