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Main Authors: Antunes, Fabio, Lima, Maria Julia Dias, Araújo, Marco Antônio Pereira, Taibi, Davide, Kalinowski, Marcos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15829
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author Antunes, Fabio
Lima, Maria Julia Dias
Araújo, Marco Antônio Pereira
Taibi, Davide
Kalinowski, Marcos
author_facet Antunes, Fabio
Lima, Maria Julia Dias
Araújo, Marco Antônio Pereira
Taibi, Davide
Kalinowski, Marcos
contents [Context] The adoption of micro-frontends architectures has gained traction as a promising approach to enhance modularity, scalability, and maintainability of web applications. [Goal] The primary aim of this research is to investigate the benefits and limitations of migrating a real-world application to a micro-frontends architecture from the perspective of the developers. [Method] Based on the action research approach, after diagnosis and planning, we applied an intervention of migrating the target web application to a micro-frontends architecture. Thereafter, the migration was evaluated in a workshop involving the remaining developers responsible for maintaining the application. During the workshop, these developers were presented with the migrated architecture, conducted a simple maintenance task, discussed benefits and limitations in a focus group to gather insights, and answered a questionnaire on the acceptance of the technology. [Results] Developers' perceptions gathered during the focus group reinforce the benefits and limitations reported in the literature. Key benefits included enhanced flexibility in technology choices, scalability of development teams, and gradual migration of technologies. However, the increased complexity of the architecture raised concerns among developers, particularly in dependency and environment management, debugging, and integration testing. [Conclusions] While micro-frontends represent a promising technology, unresolved issues still limit their broader applicability. Developers generally perceived the architecture as useful and moderately easy to use but hesitated to adopt it.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_15829
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Investigating Benefits and Limitations of Migrating to a Micro-Frontends Architecture
Antunes, Fabio
Lima, Maria Julia Dias
Araújo, Marco Antônio Pereira
Taibi, Davide
Kalinowski, Marcos
Software Engineering
[Context] The adoption of micro-frontends architectures has gained traction as a promising approach to enhance modularity, scalability, and maintainability of web applications. [Goal] The primary aim of this research is to investigate the benefits and limitations of migrating a real-world application to a micro-frontends architecture from the perspective of the developers. [Method] Based on the action research approach, after diagnosis and planning, we applied an intervention of migrating the target web application to a micro-frontends architecture. Thereafter, the migration was evaluated in a workshop involving the remaining developers responsible for maintaining the application. During the workshop, these developers were presented with the migrated architecture, conducted a simple maintenance task, discussed benefits and limitations in a focus group to gather insights, and answered a questionnaire on the acceptance of the technology. [Results] Developers' perceptions gathered during the focus group reinforce the benefits and limitations reported in the literature. Key benefits included enhanced flexibility in technology choices, scalability of development teams, and gradual migration of technologies. However, the increased complexity of the architecture raised concerns among developers, particularly in dependency and environment management, debugging, and integration testing. [Conclusions] While micro-frontends represent a promising technology, unresolved issues still limit their broader applicability. Developers generally perceived the architecture as useful and moderately easy to use but hesitated to adopt it.
title Investigating Benefits and Limitations of Migrating to a Micro-Frontends Architecture
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15829