Agility with Microservices Programming 2023

Scope

Agile architecture does not necessarily emerge from the use of agile development practices, it needs to be deliberately sought after. This often means creating systems as sets of small, independent components that collaborate to provide the desired functionality. Such components are usually loosely-coupled and expose well-defined APIs that are accessible over standard communication protocols and data formats – they can be individually developed and tested, they can be easily replaced by alternative implementations if needed, and they provide great flexibility when deploying and scaling the system.

This style of architecture is often described as microservices. Essentially, microservices decompose a system into an architecture of standalone modules that 1) are simpler to maintain and evolve, 2) scale efficiently, and 3) can be reused as building blocks for other architectures. Transitioning to a microservice architecture is crucial for companies in highly-competing markets, where agility and flexibility of software systems become a critical asset to establish leadership.

While microservices are a solution for maintainability, evolvability, and scalability, they come at a cost: an increased complexity that calls for an improvement of the current techniques for software construction and advanced engineering practices.

Theme and Topics

Agile architecture does not necessarily emerge from the use of agile development practices, it needs to be deliberately sought after. This often means creating systems as sets of small, independent components that collaborate to provide the desired functionality. Such components are usually loosely-coupled and expose well-defined APIs that are accessible over standard communication protocols and data formats—they can be individually developed and tested, they can be easily replaced by alternative implementations if needed, and they provide great flexibility when deploying and scaling the system.

This style of architecture is often described as microservices. Essentially, microservices decompose a system into an architecture of standalone modules that (i) are simpler to maintain and evolve; (ii) scale efficiently; and (iii) can be reused as building blocks for other architectures. Transitioning to a microservice architecture is crucial for companies in highly-competing markets, where agility and flexibility of software systems become a critical asset to establish leadership.

While microservices are a solution for scalability, maintainability, and evolvability, they come at a cost: an increased complexity that calls for an improvement of the current techniques for software construction and advanced engineering practices.

The AMP workshop aims at collecting experiences on microservice adoption, reporting best practises, but also specially failure cases, so as to build community knowledge based on previous errors and successes. The workshop is open to experience reports from practitioners and academia. The fourth edition of AMP aims to continue the success of its previous editions in collecting original work on the science and engineering of programming microservices.

We seek to collect original work on the science and engineering of programming microservices which including but not limited to evolutive and agile architectures, methods and tools, patterns, operations practices and DevOps, agile teams, programming languages and techniques for microservices, software quality aspects, metrics and software analytics, verification, test-driven approaches and testing, architectural refactoring, empirical studies and experience reports on microservice adoption and teaching. The topics include (but are not limited to):

Using microservices to enable an evolutive and agile architecture.
Software engineering methods and tools for microservices.
Patterns for microservices design and development.
Operations practices for microservices and DevOps support.
Impact of microservices’ usage on agile teams and processes.
Programming languages and techniques for microservices.
Combining microservices with other architectural styles.
Achieving software qualities, e.g., security, maintainability, and deployability.
Metrics and software analytics in microservices architectures.
Verification of microservice architectures.
Test-driven approaches and testing in microservices development.
Refactoring in the context of microservices architectures.
Empirical studies on microservices.
Experience reports on microservice adoption and teaching.

Contributions and Evaluation

AMP2023 seeks original contributions of the following types (maximum length):

Full papers: research papers, industry experiences, or case studies (12 pages in LNCS format + 2 extra pages for references).
Short papers: research papers, industry experiences, or case studies (8 pages in LNCS format + 2 extra pages for references).
Extended Abstracts: tool presentations, position papers (2 pages).

Papers should be formatted in Springer’s LNCS format and submitted through EasyChair.

In accordance with ECSA 2023 publication guideline, we adopt a two-step process for the workshop proceedings. Online proceedings (available before the start of the workshop) will include all the accepted papers to AMP2023 and will be published online on the ECSA 2023 web page (no proceedings). The accepted papers will be accessible only by the AMP2023.

ECSA 2023 will use a two-step process for workshop proceedings. Online proceedings (available before the start of the conference) will include all the accepted papers to the workshops and will be published online on the ECSA 2023 web page (no proceedings). The accepted papers will be accessible only by the ECSA 2023 workshop participants and the format should ,conform to LNCS (see the ECSA 2023 submission format).

After the conference, we will organize post-proceedings of selected and extended papers of workshops that will be published in a Springer LNCS volume (up to 16 pages). Candidate papers for post-proceedings will be identified during the initial paper review and workshop paper reviewers will indicate if an extended and revised version of an accepted submission should be considered for publication in the post-proceedings of LNCS. Workshop chairs will then be asked to nominate papers of their workshop to be invited for submission for the post-proceedings (e.g., based on the initial review reports, the preference of the reviewers to consider the paper for post-proceedings, as well as the workshop itself). Workshop papers submitted for the post-proceedings will undergo through a minor revision cycle where the extensions with respect to the workshop versions will be checked by the reviewers.

How to submit

Contributions should be formatted in Springer LNBIP format and submitted through EasyChair (link below) to the track [Workshop] AMP 2023: The 4th International Workshop on Agility with Microservices Programming as a PDF file interpretable by common PDF tools and printable in black and white on A4 paper.