Investigating Benefits and Limitations of Migrating to a Micro-Frontends Architecture

TL;DR

This study investigates the practical benefits and challenges of migrating a web application to a micro-frontends architecture through an action research approach involving real developers.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into developers' perceptions of micro-frontends benefits and limitations based on a real-world migration and evaluation process.

Findings

Enhanced flexibility and scalability perceived as benefits.

Complexity issues in dependency management and testing identified.

Moderate ease of use but hesitation in adoption among developers.

Abstract

[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.