Architectural Anti-Patterns in Student-Developed Microservice Architectures: An Exploratory Study

2026-02-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevalent quality deficiencies—particularly in security, collaboration, and service interaction—observed among students developing microservices, highlighting a disconnect between academic instruction and industrial practice. Through a longitudinal course project, we conducted an empirical analysis of containerized microservice systems developed by 67 teams comprising 216 master’s students, systematically identifying 23 architectural anti-patterns at scale in an educational setting for the first time, with security-related issues being most prominent. Building upon existing anti-pattern taxonomies and integrating containerized deployment, project-based learning, and longitudinal assessment, we propose an educational intervention model that embeds security-by-design principles, API contracts, and CI/CD templates. Our findings demonstrate that reinforcing engineering discipline through this model significantly enhances teaching effectiveness and software quality.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Software Engineering
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Machine Learning: Learning on the Edge & Model Compression

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments

Abstract

Teaching microservice architectures is challenging due to distributed complexity and the gap between academia and industry. Understanding the quality issues students introduce in MSAs is essential to improve education. This study analyzes student-developed microservices using an established anti-pattern taxonomy and derives lessons learned with actionable teaching recommendations. We conducted a longitudinal, project-based course (2023-2025) involving 216 Master's students (67 teams) who designed and deployed a realistic, containerized MSA for a gamified testing platform. The final systems revealed 23 out of 58 known MSA anti-patterns, spanning five categories. Security issues were most frequent, highlighting weaknesses in authentication, authorization, and data protection. Team Organization and Service Interaction problems followed, reflecting limited DevOps experience and difficulties in inter-service coordination. Fewer issues appeared in Intra-service Design and Inter-service Decomposition, suggesting students generally defined service boundaries well. Overall, students prioritized feature delivery over robustness and operational discipline. To address this, we recommend enforcing minimal standards (API contracts, gateways), providing labs on resilient communication, integrating security-by-design practices, and offering CI-CD templates. The paper contributes a realistic, full-scale educational experience and a replicable model for teaching industry-aligned microservice architecture.

Problem

• microservice architecture
• architectural anti-patterns
• software engineering education
• security issues
• DevOps

Innovation

• microservice architecture
• architectural anti-patterns
• security-by-design
• DevOps education
• project-based learning