# One Microservice per Developer: Is This the Trend in OSS?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02843 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02843/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Autonomic Microservice Management via Agentic AI and MAPE-K Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22185/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When developing and managing microservice systems, practitioners suggest that each microservice should be owned by a particular team. In effect, there is only one team with the responsibility to manage a given service. Consequently, one developer should belong to only one team. This practice of "one-microservice-per-developer" is especially prevalent in large projects with an extensive development team. Based on the bazaar-style software development model of Open Source Projects, in which different programmers, like vendors at a bazaar, offer to help out developing different parts of the system, this article investigates whether we can observe the "one-microservice-per-developer" behavior, a strategy we assume anticipated within microservice based Open Source Projects. We conducted an empirical study among 38 microservice-based OS projects. Our findings indicate that the strategy is rarely respected by open-source developers except for projects that have dedicated DevOps teams.