A Structured Process for Migrating Monolithic Web Applications to Micro-Frontends
Web development, Micro-Frontends, Architectural evolution, Migration process, Design Science Research
Many modern Web applications still rely on monolithic architectures, posing long-term challenges in scalability, complexity, and maintainability. Inspired by the well-known microservices architectural style, micro-frontends (MFEs) have emerged to decentralize the front-end (presentation layer) of these applications, promoting greater team autonomy and modularity. Despite growing industrial adoption, there is limited empirical evidence on how developers understand and adopt MFEs in practice, as well as the benefits and issues of migrating monolithic applications to this architectural style. In addition to the technical challenges, there is also a significant gap regarding clear guidelines for migrating monolithic Web applications to MFEs, which directly affects the cost, predictability, and efficiency of development processes. This work proposes a structured process for migrating monolithic Web applications to MFE-based architectures. Following the Design Science Research methodology, the process is grounded in cross-organizational empirical evidence gathered from practitioners with hands-on experience in MFE adoption and migration, and outlines activities, artifacts, and competencies involved in structured migration efforts toward MFEs. Expected contributions from this work include: (i) an empirical characterization of current MFE adoption and migration strategies, governance practices, and process structuring in this context; (ii) guidance for migrating monolithic Web applications to MFEs; and (iii) an empirical assessment of the impact of a structured migration process in practice.