Great improvements with Angular 5
When SimpleSite moves to Angular 5 we achieve some great product improvements almost out of the box. I've listed 5 of these below - they were provided by our lead front-end developer Mads Gyldhof.
- Support for progressive web applications - important for users with sub-optimal internet connections.
- Clean and structured code base - easier to maintain, test and debug code reducing lifetime cost of an application.
- Improved routing features - makes it possible to create sensible deep linking into a single page application (SPA).
- Improved standardization across browsers - important for cross-platform and cross-device support.
- Modern optimization - smaller and optimized application size improves experienced customer performance.
Not Just a Tech Project
Moving to Angular 5 is both a tech and a business project.
Our developers enjoy working with the newest versions Angular and other systems and to get a chance to make things right the second time.
From a business perspective, we get an application platform that enables our product development team to work on the things that matter - we can build a better product faster.
ROI
We have estimated that the transition to Angular 5 (from AngularJS) will take 6 man months. When the transition is finished we expect that our front-end team will be 25% more efficient from day 1, which we have already qualified. With a front-end team consisting of 4 developers, 1 UX, and 1 UI designer this will give us a return on investment of roughly 4 months.
So this project - that started as a request from the development - turns out to be a great investment for our company. The development team succeeded in presenting a tech-driven business case for the management and management learned that developers sometimes do understand business. A great learning for both parties that came out of listening to each other and be constructive in suggested solutions.
We will not reduce our team because of this - we will instead get a higher throughput on development projects. This is important in times like these where development resources are scarce.
I will follow up on this article when we have made the full transition to Angular 5 and seen which of the expected winnings were actually made.