ECSA 2024
Mon 2 - Fri 6 September 2024 Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Security smells, i.e., possible symptoms of bad design decisions, can occur in microservice-based applications, resulting in violations of key security properties and of design soundness. The decision to refactor a service to mitigate the potential effects of security smells is complex, considering the distributed responsibility of services across DevOps teams and the possible impact on their development schedules. In this work-in-progress paper, we propose a DevOps team-centric view that provides insights on the effects of refactorings on quality attributes, the urgency and effort of a refactoring, and its implications for other teams. This approach aims to support DevOps teams in making decisions in the context of microservice-based applications security and to better schedule the refactorings that mitigate the potential effects of microservice security smell instances.