Background. The migration from monolithic systems to microservices involves deep refactoring of the systems. Therefore, the migration usually has a big economic impact and companies tend to postpone several activities during this process, mainly to speed-up the migration itself, but also because of the need to release new features. Objective. We monitored the Technical Debt of a small and medium enterprise while migrating a legacy monolithic system to an ecosystem of microservices to analyze changes in the code technical debt before and after the migration to microservices. Method. We conducted a case study analyzing more than four years of the history of a big project (280K Lines of Code) where two teams extracted five business processes from the monolithic system as microservices, by first analyzing the Technical Debt with SonarQube and then performing a qualitative study with the developers to understand the perceived quality of the system and the motivation for eventually postponed activities. Result. The development of microservices helps to reduce the Technical Debt in the long run. Despite an initial spike in the Technical Debt, due to the development of the new microservice, after a relatively short period, the Technical Debt tends to grow slower than in the monolithic system.

中文翻译：

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将单体系统迁移到微服务会减少技术债务吗？

背景。从单体系统到微服务的迁移涉及系统的深度重构。因此，迁移通常会产生很大的经济影响，公司往往会在此过程中推迟一些活动，主要是为了加快迁移本身，也因为需要发布新功能。客观的。我们监控了一家中小型企业的技术债务，同时将遗留的单体系统迁移到微服务生态系统，以分析迁移到微服务前后代码技术债务的变化。方法。我们进行了一个案例研究，分析了一个大项目（28 万行代码）的四年多历史，其中两个团队从单体系统中提取了五个业务流程作为微服务，首先使用 SonarQube 分析技术债务，然后与开发人员进行定性研究，以了解系统的感知质量以及最终推迟活动的动机。结果。从长远来看，微服务的开发有助于减少技术债务。尽管最初的技术债务激增，但由于新微服务的发展，在相对较短的时间之后，技术债务的增长往往比单体系统慢。