Technical

3 Ways Micro Frontends Help You Increase Developer Joy

Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - Entando

Developer joy is a key component to the success of your enterprise. When your company or organization has a good reputation among developers, you increase your ability to effectively recruit and retain top talent, enabling you to generate better innovation more quickly as well as build a winning company culture.

There are a number of key ways that you can seek to increase developer joy within your organization, and one way may be to rethink the development methodologies you employ. Micro frontends are a trend within development that offer a number of benefits to enterprises by decoupling frontend functionality in a way similar to how microservices decouple backend components.

Developing in micro frontends is particularly advantageous for larger organizations that are looking to scale while also managing the increasing complexity of their application needs. But micro frontends are far more than a simple technology decision. They can also be an important part of your strategy to increase the job satisfaction of your developers.

Here are 3 ways that micro frontends can help you increase developer joy within your enterprise.

1. Micro frontends make it so that development teams can determine their own sprints.

One of the key benefits that micro frontends provide is that they enable your enterprise to assemble cross-functional teams that you can then empower to release updates independently from other teams.

Increased independence for your developers decreases the likelihood that friction will arise between teams, since multiple backend teams won’t need to jockey for the attention of one frontend team or wait for the entire frontend application to be updated before they can push their own feature updates.

By giving autonomy to individual development teams, you enable them to set their own schedules for testing and releases and to determine their own sprints in order to meet important deadlines and set goals for iterative updates and feature experimentation.

This kind of freedom can be highly motivating, as it enables teams to innovate at the pace of their ideas and their ability to execute them. When a team can focus on solving the development challenges presented to them, rather than also needing to simultaneously navigate organizational challenges and red tape, higher rates of job satisfaction are likely to result.

2. Micro frontends give development teams in what technologies teams use.

While the tendency of most larger organizations is to seek standardization of tools and technologies, such a strategy can work against developer joy. The truth is that there's no one set of tools that works best for every developer or every development team. And being forced into a standardized system that doesn’t account for individual preferences and strengths with regard to certain tools is enough to frustrate and demotivate any developer.

By using a microservice and micro frontend architecture, you’re able to allow for a greater technical diversity among your teams, empowering each team to decide which tool is best suited for their particular needs.

For example, one micro frontend team may decide to work using Vue, while another team works with Angular. By decoupling different UX features and allowing teams to use their favorite tools without fear of disrupting other parts of the project or organization, you remove an important barrier between them and creating their best work.

3. Micro frontends provide the ability for development teams to focus.

Another way to increase developer joy is to allow your developers to have deep focus on one or a few challenges or opportunities, rather than spreading them thin.

When a team is able to have complete ownership over an aspect of your application’s user experience, whether it’s a particular feature or an entire business unit, you enable them to think more creatively about how to make it as effective as possible. What’s more is that micro frontends combine this ability to focus with the ability to update iteratively and deploy independently, increasing the rate at which innovation can happen.

This type of focus will increase the quality of solutions your teams are able to produce in a given time, and it’s also likely to increase developer joy.

With Entando, create user experiences your customers love, and that your dev teams loved developing.

When release cycles take months instead of weeks, your business is left unable to deliver modern online experiences. Development bottlenecks slow your ability to make application updates, keeping you from iterating and innovating. And outdated or clunky UX keeps you from winning customers over and retaining them.

So that’s why we created a platform to help you get your ideas to market faster.

Entando is the leading micro frontend platform for building enterprise web apps on Kubernetes. We want to change the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to innovate more quickly.

With Entando, you can leverage customized blueprints to quickly create micro frontends and assemble them onto a single page. Then reuse UI/UX components across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, saving money and increasing development speed. Scale quickly and effectively with Entando’s custom Kubernetes operator, automating the deployment of scalable, self-healing applications.

Entando is open source with available enterprise support. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our Professional Services team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.

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