Hidden Trade-Offs in Modern Frontend Architecture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15680/IJCTECE.2023.0605010Keywords:
Frontend Architecture, Micro-Frontends, Monorepo, Shared State Management, Coordination Overhead, Operational ComplexityAbstract
The current frontend systems adopt the patterns such as micro-frontend, monorepos, shared-state models, and edges-based delivery to create rapid development and team autonomy. Such trends can generate some long-term expenses. This quantitative research study analyzed 30-50 production frontend projects which had been active at least two years. The findings reveal that the coordination overhead in micro-frontend projects was more as 42 cross-team the pull requests per month were high as opposed to 18 in monolithic systems. Mean merge time was 3.8 days as compared to 2.1. Build time was also greater 18.6 minutes as against 11.4 minutes. The rates of deployment failures were 7.8 on micro-frontend systems and 4.1 on monolithic ones. The defect density was 0.84 as compared to 0.63 and the average bug fix time was 4.6 days as compared to 3.2 days. Those results reveal that the modern frontend abstractions, even though making the frontend more flexible, lead to more coordination work, complexity of operations, and maintenance overhead in the span of the time
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