2024/07/22 by Fabio Antunes, Maria Julia Lima, Antunes, Fabio +7
Engineering · #3D IC and TSV technologies #Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Manufacturing Process and Optimization #Software Engineering (cs.SE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.15829
openalex publication_date 2024/07/22 · openalex created_date 2025/01/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
[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.