scaling software teams

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Over the years I have been part of teams that followed different approaches for software development. If I look back, often it was decided based on the size of teams and the way teams were organized.

especially when there were multiple software teams that had some dependency between each other, that’s when things got bit more interesting.

To keep things simple, let’s just focus on frontend projects.

One common situation is when there is only 1 team & they are tasked to build/ maintain more than one project , let’s assume 2. Here the main constraint would be to ensure same look and feel (design system) across bit these projects.

A proven approach is to create a shared module (a component lib) & publish it as a private scoped npm package. through an artifactory (ex: jFrog, Azure Artifacts).

The downside to this approach is that each time we make a change to this package, it needs to be published & then pulled from both the projects before we can actually see the changes. also it comes with the overhead of needing to have an artifactory.

A better approach would be to go for a monorepo (Nx) where we can have everything in one place. i.e. the shared module alongside all the projects. This would ensure whatever changes we make to the shared module can be previewed instantly. we don’t need an artifactory and we bring down the number of repositories to just one! — Makes things much simpler. Now assume,

*we move along & now we decide to have multiple teams & we need to build more applications. How can we facilitate this expansion?*

This is where **micro frontends (MFE) would perfectly fit in. It allows to break down monolithic frontends into smaller, independently deployable pieces** of software. So how would you do it? there are 3 standard approaches to achieve this:

• iFrame (1990s — 2000)
• Web Components (2003)
• Module Federation (2020, webpack 5)

For instance, webpack supports module federation. Some famous examples would be Amazon, Spotify, IKEA & Zalando. More reference / reading.