What Is a Front-end Group, and Why Should You Consider Creating One?

At Heureka, our development culture is based around autonomous teams. Each team takes responsibility for a specific aspect of the product or even a whole business solution. In such an environment, having a technical group is invaluable. It allows you to connect with like-minded individuals within the company, share your knowledge, and learn something new. This is how our Front-end Group operates.

What are Technical Groups?

If you decide to work with us as a developer, you will be part of a team, which could be smaller or larger in size. You can also choose to join one of our various technical groups such as security, testing, front-end, and others. I am myself part of the last-named Front-end group. I would like to shed some light on what it means to be its active member.

In Heureka, a technical group (referred to as a guild in some companies) is a voluntary association of developers focused on a specific topic. The objective is to coordinate otherwise separated and fully autonomous teams to ensure all teams adhere to the same standards and share their knowledge with each other. An additional advantage is that members can discuss their technical problems with a potentially experienced audience and, most importantly, get to know other colleagues.

Improving Ourselves and Integrating Website User Interfaces at the Same Time

As the Front-end group, we are a community of passionate front-end developers across the Heureka Group. What brings us together is pretty simple. We have chosen to be part of this community with the following objectives:

• Improve ourselves as front-end developers: We share our knowledge, discuss interesting tools, and explore topics related to self-development.
• Enhance Heureka Group websites with more integrated user interfaces.

Our primary responsibility is to develop and maintain our UI library called OneUI. This library contains shared stylesheets, React components, icons, and branding images. Another responsibility is to improve our webs technologically, such as new tooling, updates, and performance improvements, such as reducing bundle sizes through shared libraries across micro front-ends.

How Do You Organize 20 Members from Different Company Teams? 

There are about 250 people in HeurekaDevs (Development and Product), and about 30–50 people do front-end-related work. Currently, our Front-end group has more than 20 active members, and we are actively seeking more to join us. 

Capacities: How Much Time Do We Dedicate to Front-end Group

Each member has 5% of their sprint capacity dedicated to the group which they are in. Moreover, our company allows for an „Improvement Day“. It means that everyone can work on a goal of their choice one day every sprint. Thus, you can dedicate these two days a month, for example, to tasks related to a technical group.

Regular Communication Routine is the Key to Effectiveness

We have regular meetings: a two-hour session once a month (usually on Fridays) for discussions and demonstrations. This can be, for example, a demonstration of new technologies such as presentations about Remix, Redux Toolkit Query etc. or discussions about whatever we need those technologies in our tech stack. In general, it helps us to find the right way of Heureka Group webpages for the future. Additionally, we maintain a separate Jira board to track tasks related to the Front-end group, and we use architectural decision records to track our decisions – our latest decision was about prop ordering in React components.

Hackathons: A Perfect Tool for Implementing Significant Changes Together

Implementing significant changes, such as rewriting an old UI library or updating all micro front-ends simultaneously, within the constraints of regular work can be challenging. This is where the concept of Hackathons becomes invaluable – it is easier to convince managers to allocate one day per month for nearly 20 people than to secure more time during every sprint! 

We are using hackathons regularly, and we have found that this is the way to go, as it works pretty well for us.
(I hope to share more details in a subsequent article later. There is also a Czech talk Martin gave on the benefits of hackathons https://www.heurekadevs.cz/martin-kristof-pro-frontendisty-jak-vyuzit-silu-spolecne-prace. Feel free to refer to it if you want more info now).

Technical Group Is an Invaluable Platform

I believe that this concept is an excellent platform for every member of the development department, not just the developers but also for product managers, scrum masters and the rest of the product team. It is beneficial for discussing topics and mutually improving with colleagues. While working on routine tasks, you often have plenty of ideas for enhancing your work, and you want to share results with others. The technical group creates the perfect environment where I feel comfortable discussing and implementing these ideas.