Challenges while working on Sencha Projects

We have been using Sencha Technologies since 2008 and you can imagine that we have been asked to get involved in various situations and at different stages of the projects.

Over a period, we have seen product / customer’s team struggling with various types of challenges. When I talked to some of our senior engineers and asked them to comprehend the challenges that they observed, we had following list

• Just do it attitude
  • Poor Quality of existing code
  • Mixing up Bootstrap, jQuery and other codes with Ext JS without understanding Ext JS
  • Reinventing the wheel and writing the duplicate codes
• Misaligned / Apathetic Expectations
  • In terms of efforts required as well as the feasibility
  • Micromanagement of team members
  • Vague Performance Goals
  • Expecting the developers to be an expert in all the areas and phases of the delivery
  • Comparing jQuery, Angular JS, etc features and expecting Ext JS to cover at least all the stuff existing in these libraries
  • Comparing Sencha Touch with Native SDKs and Native Cross Platforms frameworks like Xamrin
• Communication and Emotional Issues
  • Tussle on agreed contract between the front-end and backend integration points
  • Biased views and extreme remarks
  • Feasibility being linked with capability
• Skill Gap
  • Lack of right skilled team of Sencha Developers
  • Lack of good Problem Solving Skills of involved developers (breaking the screens into reusable components)
  • Lack of good understanding of HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript
  • Lack of usage of the overall ecosystem provided by Sencha – specifically, tools related tocode / config generation, build, test and deployment
• Other Key Challenges
  • Ignorance of test automation and continuous testing
  • Lack of end-to-end test Environment Setup
  • Backend Developers generating Sencha UI code on the Server
  • Wrong choice of technology (e.g. building CMS using Ext JS or Sencha Touch)
• Sencha Version Upgrades
  • Different versions needed different style of programming
  • Cost of migrating or working with different version in same solution became high

I would love to hear from you on the challenges which have impacted you the most. It will be great if you can participate in the following poll and let me know the issues which you consider(ed) the most challenging:

[polldaddy poll=9156097]

I will be discussing these challenges in details during my session in the upcoming Sencha Roadshow in Bangalore and Mumbai. You can look at my related linked-post to know more about the session. Looking forward to meet some of you!