Analyzing Evolution of Microservice-Based Systems: Vision—An Extensible Methodology for Formal Software Verification in Microservice Systems

Microservice-based architecture has become a dominant style for building cloud-native systems, but their rapid and continuous evolution makes it difficult to understand, verify, and control the impact of change. Although many works address microservices from the perspectives of design, deployment, and operation, there is still limited consolidated knowledge on how the evolution and verification of microservice-based systems are supported in the research literature. This paper reports on a systematic literature review (SLR) on methods and tools for analyzing evolution and providing verification support in microservice-based systems. Following established SLR guidelines, we defined a review protocol with focused research questions, executed structured searches in major digital libraries, and applied explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria tailored to cloud-native microservices. Candidate studies were screened through multiple stages, supported by an academic queries table, a statistics table summarizing the selection process, and a quality assessment checklist. For each included primary study, we extracted data on the type of evolution or change considered, the analysis or verification technique used, the form of tool support, and the nature of empirical evaluation. The review highlights a small but emerging body of work that combines microservice evolution with formal verification, runtime monitoring, and model-based analysis. However, empirical evidence is often limited to small case studies, with few industrial-scale evaluations and little shared tooling or datasets. We conclude by identifying gaps and outlining a research agenda for more robust, empirically grounded approaches to microservice evolution and verification.