Key Developer Roles and Organizational Coupling in Microservices: A Longitudinal Analysis

2026-04-28

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in the literature by shifting focus from structural aspects of microservice architectures to the role of developers in shaping organizational coupling (OC). Through longitudinal mining of GitHub repositories—including commits, issues, and pull requests—the authors identify three key developer roles: Jacks, Mavens, and Connectors. They quantify each role’s contribution to OC and its evolutionary dynamics, revealing for the first time that OC is fundamentally a role-driven phenomenon. Specifically, Connectors significantly intensify global coupling, whereas Jacks and Mavens exert more localized effects. Moreover, the co-occurrence of multiple roles amplifies coupling effects. These findings offer a novel, role-aware perspective for designing organizational structures in microservice ecosystems.

Abstract

Microservice-based systems impose significant organizational coordination challenges, yet the role of individual developers in shaping organizational coupling (OC) remains underexplored. Prior work largely focuses on structural architectural aspects, leaving gaps in understanding how developer roles influence coordination dynamics over time. This study investigates how different developer roles contribute to OC in a large-scale microservices system. The analysis focuses on three key roles, namely Jacks, representing broad knowledge holders, Mavens, representing deep specialists, and Connectors, representing organizational bridges. A longitudinal repository mining analysis of GitHub data, including commits and issue and pull request interactions, is conducted to operationalize OC and quantify its evolution over time. The results show that Connectors are consistently associated with higher levels of OC, while the co-occurrence of multiple roles within the same developer further amplifies coupling effects. In contrast, Jacks and Mavens exhibit more localized and role-specific influences. These findings indicate that OC in microservices is primarily a role-driven phenomenon rather than an inevitable structural property, providing a foundation for role-aware organizational design and targeted decoupling strategies.

Problem

• microservices
• organizational coupling
• developer roles
• coordination dynamics
• longitudinal analysis

Innovation

• organizational coupling
• developer roles
• microservices
• longitudinal analysis
• repository mining