Architecture

I’m working for a client that has separate teams for architecture and engineering. Architecture is responsible for defining the long-term direction of the platform and engineering is responsible making that dream a reality, in addition to their day-to-day sprint work. Each engineering pod has a representative from architecture as one of its members but their role is mostly about producing documents and interfacing between the two teams - they don’t touch the code at all.

The backend-for-frontend (BFF) pattern is when a backend API is designed specifically for the needs of a frontend consumer. The BFF is intended to make frontend development simple, moving all the complexity and “business logic” to the backend and allowing the frontend to deal with a single backend. The backend BFF API closely resembles the flows and screen designs of the frontend.

The initial development experience is often positive. The frontend team can focus on the UI/UX aspects of the application, and the backend team can handle all the downstream integrations and data transformations.