Architectural Anti-Patterns in Student-Developed Microservice Architectures: An Exploratory Study

TL;DR

This study explores common anti-patterns in student-developed microservice architectures, revealing frequent security and organizational issues, and offers actionable teaching strategies to improve microservice education.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of anti-patterns in student microservices and proposes practical recommendations for teaching industry-relevant microservice design.

Findings

23 out of 58 known anti-patterns observed in student projects

Security issues were the most frequent anti-patterns

Students generally defined service boundaries well

Abstract

Teaching microservice architectures is challenging due to distributed complexity and the gap between academia and industry. Understanding the quality issues students introduce in MSAs is essential to improve education. This study analyzes student-developed microservices using an established anti-pattern taxonomy and derives lessons learned with actionable teaching recommendations. We conducted a longitudinal, project-based course (2023-2025) involving 216 Master's students (67 teams) who designed and deployed a realistic, containerized MSA for a gamified testing platform. The final systems revealed 23 out of 58 known MSA anti-patterns, spanning five categories. Security issues were most frequent, highlighting weaknesses in authentication, authorization, and data protection. Team Organization and Service Interaction problems followed, reflecting limited DevOps experience and difficulties in inter-service coordination. Fewer issues appeared in Intra-service Design and Inter-service Decomposition, suggesting students generally defined service boundaries well. Overall, students prioritized feature delivery over robustness and operational discipline. To address this, we recommend enforcing minimal standards (API contracts, gateways), providing labs on resilient communication, integrating security-by-design practices, and offering CI-CD templates. The paper contributes a realistic, full-scale educational experience and a replicable model for teaching industry-aligned microservice architecture.