Front-End vs Back-End: Key Roles in SaaS and PaaS Projects

Developer Roles in SaaS vs Custom

When you are working on these two platforms, PaaS vs SaaS, the software developer that is developing on a SaaS solution, they're really just focusing on the front-end software. They need to make sure that that is a good user experience and that all that is working well in the browser side.

Whereas, a developer that's working on either a full stack, meaning both front and back-end, or just on the back-end, are considering about how to make things fast on the server side before that information gets sent over.

There're two considerations on scalability and performance. And so, a lot of times with SaaS, the scalability and performance is largely out of the developer's hands. There're still things they can do on the front-end to make some tweaks, to make things load faster.  Things like the page load times and the JavaScript performance.

In a PaaS solution, you need to consider all of the different performance throughout the entire lifecycle of the request. Whereas on the SaaS, you really can just focus more on the page time and the JavaScript because you don't have control over the stuff that's happening in the background. It's still there, but you don't have control over that.

Every developer's not the same. You need to understand what their skills are and find out whether they are more suited for the front-end or more suited for the back-end when you're developing for SaaS, where you need the front end and PaaS and custom where you need both.

QA in SaaS vs Custom: What Changes?

In the SaaS solution, the QAs can focus more on acceptance criteria and the final functionality, and they kind of expect the backend to be working. There's really not a lot of testing that has to happen on the end-to-end processes. It's really more focusing on how does it look? What's the user experience?

In the PaaS and standalone customized configuration, you have more variables to consider. Oftentimes, it's difficult to test full end-to-end complexities. So making sure that each part of the end-to-end works individually is where we like to focus. So, you still are doing the front-end work and making sure that the user experience is correct. But you also need to make sure all of your back-end code is working properly.

BA vs BSA: What to Know

The BA is a business analyst who focuses more on the front-end and the functionality and how that works for an end user. The BSA is the business systems analyst and they typically focus on how are the back-end systems working and how is the integration working.

So for the BA, between the SaaS solution and the PaaS solution, the items are very similar because the end functionality for the end user and the user experience is very similar between the two.

For the BSA, it ends up being very different. They're really considering what are the business processes that need to be in place? What does the software need to do to support that business process? And on a SaaS solution where the backend is already pre-built for them, there's not a lot of things they can change there.