For the benefit of new producers, this document loosely outlines the roles and expectations of a front-end (FE) developer Discipline Lead, Senior / Lead Developers, and Supporting Developer. FE developers are responsible for building the user-facing interactive layer of websites and applications in a growing number of environments (devices + browsers), languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash), and tool-sets (Django, SASS, jQuery). FE developers interface with designers and back-end developers to cohesively couple complex visuals and branded art, to animated and interactive functional systems, to server-side APIs and services.
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FE Discipline Lead responsibilities:
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Administrative support for early project scheduling and scoping.
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Document FE processes, standards, goals, direction, and initiatives.
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Project-specific technical or administrative consultation where necessary.
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Auditing of FE development tools, implementations, frameworks, and standards.
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Cross-discipline team interfacing.
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Provide analysis on current project status
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Represents front-end team needs and facilitates collaboration across disciplines and within the front-end team
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Senior FE Lead Developer Responsibilities:
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Architecting / Leading / Overseeing front-end technical approach, process, development, and analysis for a defined product or project.
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Managing other FE developers on a project team when project requires multiple developers.
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Maintaining RedMine tasks and status updates to detail technical approach, progress, and other documentation.
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Provide support, perspective, and recommendations on process, standards, and direction of front-end team initiatives.
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May provide support (take a supporting role) on projects
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Supporting Developer Responsibilities:
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Support development and technical execution of front-end solutions.
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Learn and extend Lead Developers standards and tools.
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Execute and develop specific tools within a larger system following guidance from Lead FE Developer on the project
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Familiarize with dev tools, learn process, and eventually grow into a Lead Developer on a project team.
Any project requiring front-end development (Flash or HTML) will have a senior front-end developer assigned or available before the Statement of Work (SOW) is finalized to provide any combination of creative input, vetting of technology solutions, and time estimations and scoping. The lead front-end developer for your project can provide a variety of solutions based on cost/timing/technology specifications often resulting in a more accurately scoped SOW.
Once a project specification and SOW are available, the Lead FE Developer will break down the project into tasks in RedMine with time estimates and due-dates. As the project continues, more specific tasks, bug reports, and requests are added to the RedMine project by all members of the team. Often, having a list of outstanding tasks enables the lead front-end developer or producer to accurately estimate project support needs. When supporting developers are activated they can efficiently be assigned tasks in RedMine and more easily view the state of the current project.
- Environments:
- Back-end and Front-end developers have personal development environments accessible within the RED office
- Back-end developers push content to public Staging, Beta, and Production servers so you can share the site with clients and QA the site.
- Producers can access developer's individual development environments but should rely on the public Staging / Beta / Production servers for QA.
- QA:
- Please schedule time for appropriate project QA.
- Front-end developers self-edit as they program but rely heavily on QA feedback to properly find, recreate, schedule, and fix bugs.
- Bug reports are added to RedMine with proper instructions and references to easily find and reproduce the bug.
- Content Publishing:
- Back-end push new content to the public servers.
- The front-end developer may have restricted access to push "media" and "template" changes (CSS,JS,HTML...) but this depends on the type of project
- Front-end developer shares the responsibility of properly identifying and addressing bug reports on live systems.
The front-end development team meets once a week to discuss our individual projects, upcoming projects, and our understanding and vision for RED's technology output from process and integration to execution. We use this time to get feedback on our individual projects, get inspiration for creative solutions, and coordinate implementations/experimentation of new technology.
FE developers provide unique and knowledgeable insight on projects and campaigns because they integrate so closely with all other disciplines throughout the life of a project. Please include them in postmortems and results-sharing as they have a vested interest in the goals, successes, and failures of the work. Share expected success-metrics with them early and keep the FE Lead Developer involved in monitoring and improving a live website.