When adopting a microservice architecture, maintenance is needed to keep the system

working. Maintenance can sometimes involve more than one team that needs to

collaborate in order to fix a maintenance issue. This procedure requires coordination

and correspondence between teams which can have a negative impact on the autonomy

of the teams. The microservice architecture does not only introduce new benefits but

also new challenges.

This study creates a strategy guideline that organisations can use to address these

challenges. The study highlights challenges with collaboration in maintenance and

gives suggestions on strategies to use to counter the challenges. This guideline can help

organisations new to the microservice architecture and help organisations to make

future maintenance decisions in a microservice architecture with multiple teams.

The guideline is developed using the Convergent Parallel Design and by interviewing

product owners, architects, and developers in three organisations working with

microservices. A survey was sent out to people working with microservices in different

industries to validate the findings from the interviews. The interviews and the survey is

analysed using the five steps described in the book “A Step-By-Step Guide To

Qualitative Data Analysis” by O'Connor and Gibson (2003).

This paper is focused on how agile teams collaborate with maintenance across

microservices and does not cover teamwork within the agile team. This paper does not

cover any technical aspects of microservices, such as application programming

interface endpoints between services, but rather how teams work with them.