Front-End on a Team

A front-end developer is typically only one player on a team that designs and develops web sites, web applications, or native applications running from web technologies.

A bare bones development team for building professional web sites or software for the web platform will typically, minimally, contain the following roles.

• Visual Designer (i.e., fonts, colors, spacing, emotion, visuals concepts & themes)
• UI/Interaction Designer/Information Architect (i.e., wireframes, specifying all user interactions and UI functionality, structuring information)
• Front-End Developer (i.e., writes code that runs in client/on device)
• Back-End Developer (i.e., writes code that runs on server)

The roles are ordered according to overlapping skills. A front-end developer will typically have a good handle on UI/Interaction design as well as back-end development. It is not uncommon for team members to fill more than one role by taking on the responsibilities of an over-lapping role.

It is assumed that the team mentioned above is being directed by a project lead or some kind of product owner (i.e., stakeholder, project manager, project lead, etc.)

A larger web team might include the following roles not shown above:

• SEO Strategists
• DevOps Engineers
• Code Quality Engineers
• Performance Engineers
• API Developers
• Database Administrators
• QA Engineers / Testers

NOTES:

A small trend seems to be occurring where a, “full-stack developer” takes on the responsibilities of both a front-end and back-end developer.