  Microservice-based systems are often complex to understand, especially when
their sizes grow. Abstracted views help practitioners with the system
understanding from a certain perspective. Recent advancement in interactive
data visualization begs the question of whether established software
engineering models to visualize system design remain the most suited approach
for the service-oriented design of microservices. Our recent work proposed
presenting a 3D visualization for microservices in augmented reality. This
paper analyzes whether such an approach brings any benefits to practitioners
when dealing with selected architectural questions related to system design
quality. For this purpose, we conducted a controlled experiment involving 20
participants investigating their performance in identifying service dependency,
service cardinality, and bottlenecks. Results show that the 3D enables novices
to perform as well as experts in the detection of service dependencies,
especially in large systems, while no differences are reported for the
identification of service cardinality and bottlenecks. We recommend industry
and researchers to further investigate AR for microservice architectural
analysis, especially to ease the onboarding of new developers in
microservice~projects.
