What is your opinion about full-stack teams? I’m referring to teams where the desire is for every member to competently contribute at every point in the stack.

  • Do they work?
  • What has been your experience?
  • Does team size and/or experience level inform your opinion?
  • Do you notice an increase/decrease in quality?
  • Do you notice an increase/decrease in team and product cohesion?
  • speaker_hat@lemmy.one
    81·
    1 year ago

    It works, but not better than having each team member specialized in one subject. It just works, but it has it’s own pros and cons:

    my experience

    In my specific experience, when you talk about “full-stack” I don’t only think about one “FE-BE-DB” project, but also another projects which are part of the company products (i.e. embedded products, testing infrastructure, cloud engineering…).

    Pros:

    • For management, it reduces the “cost” of a team member quit, because the rest of the team can quickly and easily cover up his tasks.
    • For management, it’s easy to assign a feature, they can peek anybody.
    • It makes developers to understand how the different parts of the projects communicate which each other, their impact and how they work.
    • Works better for startups where projects and teams are small and agile and usually the projects are MVP.

    Cons:

    • Developers who specialize (or really like to specialize) in a specific subject, naturally won’t last in this team more than 1-2 years (guaranteed).
    • Features quality and velocity, at the beginning, slightly drops, a bit more bugs occur. Overtime it will be better depends on the team members learning curve.
    • You won’t have someone that masters a specific subject if you’ll need one.
    • Doesn’t work good on enterprise, where there are lots of huge projects, and the product is stable and full (not only MVP).