Having gone through three jobs in my young career, there is one thing that I’ve learned when it comes to triaging bugs. Just because a bug appears on the front-end, doesn’t mean it is a front-end bug. The front-end may just exhibit a symptom of the actual bug that exists in the back-end. Front-end developers, don’t get too worked up with people giving you bugs; you should accept any bug and gain an additional skill of locating where the bug is.
The front-end is the only thing that clients see when it comes to a website. When I mention clients, what I mean to say is business owners, QA engineers, actual clients, and just about anyone that doesn’t have a deep understanding of how technology works. The more I’ve grown in my career, the more I learn how things work. There have been a handful of times where a bug is given to me, and I would quickly identify it as a back-end bug because the bug would not fit with my knowledge of how the front-end worked. To guess where the origin of the bug was, the symptom on the front-end could help locate which API bug is faulty. A good front-end developer will learn how systems work so that they can identify where a bug is located.
I’ve observed that back-end developers have confidence in their code, even if they may have accidentally introduced a bug. There have been a handful of times where a back-end developer would identify the symptom on the front-end and ask me to fix it. As I previously mentioned, I could see if the bug was actually the back-end domain. I would point the bug back to the developer and give my reasons why. To be helpful, I take responsibility of the bug and locate the API that was faulty, then I would give the bug back to the back-end developer. The important thing to remember here is to not come off as defensive but helpful. Once a front-end developer is helpful rather than defensive, then developer can gain trust and contribute to the team.
It is important to learn and grow in the career of a front-end developer, so that a front-end developer can know what it takes to make a web application work. It is also important to know how to contribute to a team by being helpful to the team. Knowing where bugs are probably located and being helpful are a couple things that would make a front-end developer invaluable to a team. It would also serve that front-end developer to make his or her career even better.