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Oleksandr
Oleksandr

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If you are front-end dev - how do you keep yourself concentrated on grooming when BE guys discuss their technical details?

The problem is that I start dreaming if BE is being discussed more than 5-7 min, since I our BE implementation not an easy one and I cannot help BE guys or get into discussion. And since I am dreaming I often got cought by scrum-master that I miss something when BE are done and we start some FE discussion.
Any ideas?

Latest comments (14)

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stealthmusic profile image
Jan Wedel

We decided to go Full-Stack. Backend Devs learned Frontend and the other way around. It’s pretty awesome (except from some smaller annoyances).

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oleksandr profile image
Oleksandr

I thought about it actually and even talked to techlead about it. It our case the problem to do this way is a big learning curve bc of hard legacy code and big code base both FE (Angular, Angularjs, backbone, jquery-based script) and BE (php, php7, go). Infrastructure is cloud, docker, jenkins, elastic-search. I'm still learning business logic of our app as well as FE codebase (many separate apps).
So maybe in this case becoming full-stack is not so good.
But anyway thankd for.c sharing! Appreciate it.

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stealthmusic profile image
Jan Wedel

In our situation it’s pretty much the same, we have AngularJS and Angular in the frontend and Vert.x and Spring Boot in the backend. Large code base and yes, sometimes it’s hard and it takes more time and effort, but that how it is. You could also to pair programming. The other option would be to do a complete rewrite which would certainly result in higher effort. The value of estimating, refining and planning together is much higher...

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Stacy Cashmore

This is a problem we have as well.

We've just got a new (to our team) front ender and the way that we have resolved it is to make sure that we pair with him - both FE and BE. That way he gets a better understanding of the work, and so do we.

And this spills over into the refining - we all work on it all so we all need to take part. Sure he doesn't know the language yet, but he's starting to know the complexities, and we have the same when looking into the FE parts of our stories.

It's not a fast process, but we do see benefits already.

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oleksandr profile image
Oleksandr

Thanks for sharing! Pairing - you mean pair-programming sessions?

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Stacy Cashmore

Yes, we try to pair as much as possible, and our recent change has been to include our FE team member in these sessions, rather than splitting the work and finishing it separately.

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oleksandr profile image
Oleksandr

Does it mean that BE dev and FE dev together first finish some BE task and yhen together do some FE task?

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Stacy Cashmore

Yes, that's it. As a team we pick up a story, and try to make sure our stories as complete functionality - and not split across technical lines.

We split the work for that story into tasks in a way that allows us all to work on it.

And then we pair to get it completed.

We're still learning, but now we've got some experience we really see the benefits of working this way!

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oleksandr profile image
Oleksandr

Sounds interesting! Do you plan devs to become fullstack finally, or your goal is just to get deeper understanding accross FE and BE?

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Stacy Cashmore

I think that to begin with we want a deeper understanding, and gain some extra skills (rather than asking the FE or BE to do tasks that we should really be able to do).

Where it goes long term? I have no idea - but I'm looking forward to the journey!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Asking questions about backend stuff, purely for your education and could be a useful way to keep yourself a bit more engaged and attentive.

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oleksandr profile image
Oleksandr

Usually I'd do like this, but it is legacy with a lot of parts and tech solutions with different frameworks in FE, so I haven't even finished FE part yet)
But digging deeper in BE anyway a way to go I think

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lepinekong

If it's an impediment for you, it is the role of scrummaster to alleviate it ;)

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Oleksandr

Actually the only project where I didn't that problem was project where I did full stack (FE and BE on Node+Mongo)