MICROFRONTENDS: TAKING THE MICROSERVICES PERSPECTIVE TO FRONTEND DEVELOPMENT

Abstract: Microfrontend architecture is attracting increasing attention from companies that have applications with a large number of users. The traditional monolithic architecture used in the developmentof these applications causes a bottleneck when a large number of users interact with the application.Also, monolithic applications become more challenging to maintain, scale and implement new features over time. New developers must get familiar with the whole codebase before they can makea concrete contribution to the team. One of the solutions is the migration of these applications tomicrofrontend architecture. The term microfrontend is relatively new, although the basic principles on which this architecture is based are already known and used in microservice architecture.This thesis aims to investigate the possibilities of implementing the basic principles of microservice architecture in frontend development, as well as to identify the benefits and challenges thatmicrofrontend architecture brings with it. In the research process, two research methods were used:an experiment and a case study. Before conducting the experiment, a demo prototype of the application was created. The experiment consisted of migrating an existing monolithic applicationto the microfrontend architecture. The basic principles identified for microfrontend architecturehave been met: loose coupling, single responsibility, standalone deployment and framework agnosticism. A case study was conducted among developers, to collect data on their perspective andview on the migrated application, as well as the benefits and risks they see in the microfrontendarchitecture. The developers also provided information regarding the quality attributes (QAs) fromthe ISO/IEC 25010 standard, processed by DEMATEL, to single out most affected by this migration. Based on the collected data, this thesis provides an overview of the benefits and challengesthat should be paid attention to, when using microfrontend architecture, as well as a detailed planfor the development of applications with microfrontend architecture, developers’ view regarding themicrofrontend architecture, and an insight into which QAs from the selected, are the most affectedones by migration.