This paper addresses the challenge of issue management in complex, component-based software architectures, such as microservices. In these systems, issues in one component often propagate across the architecture along the call chains. Yet, traditional issue management systems (IMSs) are limited to the boundaries of a single component and lack mechanisms for managing issues concerning their architectural dependencies. We present Gropius, a novel process and tool that enhances issue management by integrating issues with the architectural context in an architecture graph. Gropius allows for semantic linking of issues across different components, synchronizes changes with underlying IMSs like GitHub, and allows modeling the architecture ontologically by defining the components’ semantics at runtime. This research explores whether combining issue and architecture management improves the development of component-based architectures regarding issue management. We hypothesize that this method will significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of identifying and resolving cross-component issues, maintaining a comprehensive view of the application’s state.

For a CV, please take a look at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandro-speth/.