JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

Software development had been around for centuries and the need to provide the right techniques for delivering it, it’s indispensable as the market is growing fast. Many companies have adapted microservices as a transition from monolithic backend applications. While the microservice approach solved various issues present in backend applications, frontend architecture is still composed as a monolithic application. Issues arise as the frontend application increases in scale and become difficult to maintain.

This study aims to give an introduction to micro frontend architecture as a technique of solving different issues present in frontend development. It will analyze how the micro frontend approach is perceived by developers with different levels of experience compared to a more traditional approach of developing monolithic frontend application, single page application.

To provide answers for the question, we compared the performance of 6 developers with different levels of experience that architectured and implemented a simple frontend application using single page application and micro frontend. The results showed that developers’ experience mattered while developing single page application as the approach was perceived as easy. On the micro frontend counterpart, having previous experience with setting up micro frontend applications had a major impact on the perceived difficulty. Although the perceived difficulty of micro frontend remains higher compared to single page application, developers shared the same consent for using the micro frontend approach for large-scale applications.