[JustinCS]

I'm saying from the perspective of someone overseeing a frontend dev, that I can just try out the app feature and see if things seem to be working as expected. Though as you mention, it's necessary to check a variety of devices and other edge cases, depending on the project requirements.

With backend though, even if it seems to work, there can be severe hidden problems with the architecture and security, so I really need to trust the backend dev or verify things deeply myself in order to ensure quality.

If I'm making a quick app for a startup, I can often hire relatively less experienced frontend devs, but have to care much more about the backend.

[simonw]

I hope you're testing for all of the following:

- All of the widely used mobile and desktop browsers

- Inexpensive Android devices - very common, most devs don't test in them, frequently suffer from terrible frontend performance that goes overlooked

- Browsers running common ad blockers

- Screenreaders - frontend accessibility is a whole speciality in itself

- SEO concerns, making sure crawlers see the right stuff

- Slow network connections - simulate how the site behaves on devices in rural areas with bad connections

[JustinCS]

It really depends what I'm building, and I find that these are often additional tasks that are done later after the core functionality is validated. I've most often built apps used internally or to test concepts for early user feedback, that had a relatively low bar. But regardless, I can verify these without as much deep knowledge of the code by trying them myself, but can't verify easily that the backend was coded securely and properly.

But, covering all these cases and doing all the polish and animations expected of high quality frontends has usually taken much longer when I've needed to do it, 80% of the dev time has been frontend in some cases.

[rimunroe]

> It really depends what I'm building, and I find that these are often additional tasks that are done later after the core functionality is validated. I've most often built apps used internally or to test concepts for early user feedback, that had a relatively low bar.

Prototyping and internal tooling are both obviously things with far different bars for quality (much as I wish internal tooling wasn’t treated like that). I’ve not felt much difference in prototyping endpoints on the backend versus new pages in the UI in terms of difficulty. Internal sites usually have dramatically lower quality bars than production apps, though hopefully you’re not treating accessibility any differently for them. A company can mandate that their employees use a specific browser. The company knows which hardware/OS are used. They also can often support only one language unless they’re large. Most tools don’t have to worry much about turning away customers.

Earlier you mentioned sneaking architectural issues. Frontends are rife with these, and this is part of why there’s so much churn in frontend frameworks and APIs. It’s often incredibly easy to make a UI which appears to work and satisfy the requirements as given, but unless you’re aware of the things listed in other comments the resulting codebase might need an entire rewrite to support the actual features which customers expect. Maybe you built an entire UX which fundamentally doesn’t work when using a screen reader or a software keyboard. You might you have no way to support optimistic updates or undo. Maybe your choice of routing framework won’t allow you to block a route update until some data is loaded or an animation is finished. Sometimes these things are easy to bolt on, sometimes they result in weeks of lost progress. All that might be acceptable for an internal site, but the vast majority of frontend developers spend most of their time on client-facing ones.

I guess my main point is that I frequently hear stuff like this from backend developers, and I also frequently have to fix the frontend code they wrote because they just didn’t know how much goes into making the slightest bit of a non-trivial workflow for customers. As an aside, I think the worst offenders in this regard are actually people who describe themselves as full stack. I have done a fair bit of backend work. I’m not full stack. My backend work rarely has to worry about load balancing or database consistency, but that’s because actual backend devs are catching those things for me. I know those things exist though, and that many more that I’m not aware of do too.

[collingreen]

> I'm saying from the perspective of someone overseeing a frontend dev, that I can just try out the app feature and see if things seem to be working as expected

Not every project has a quality bar as low as this.