Experiences on a Frameworkless Micro-Frontend Architecture in a Small Organization

Micro-frontend (MFE) architecture for a web application aims at doing the same for a monolithic user interface (UI) that microservices do for a monolithic backend: it decomposes the UI into self-contained components that can be developed, deployed, and provisioned together with their associated backend service. This paper represents a small team’s experiences at the Visma company transforming its monolithic UI into a Micro-frontend solution. We describe the motivations, the key design decisions based on Web Component technologies, the design and implementation process including ATAM-based architectural assessment, and our learnings from the case. The key takeaways are that (1) the motivations for MFE concerned improving customer-specific configurability and lowering the related costs rather than enabling team independence, (2) the APIs provided by web standards — and the Web Components API based on them — offered a competitive alternative for JavaScript frameworks avoiding many framework-induced problems, and (3) small organizations without a large number of feature teams can benefit from Micro-frontend architectures.