Sustainably developing plugins in Backstage
Plugins are not created in a vacuum, they generally solve a customer ask, be that
- a business problem, like showing cloud spend
- a new integration, like showing data from an external vendor such as Pagerduty
- a developer pain point, like organizing information from disjoint or disorganized systems.
To ensure that your plugin lives the test of time, you'll need to figure out how to keep it up-to-date,
Finding your stakeholders
Iterating on your plugin
In many cases, your first version of a plugin will cut a few corners - this is a good sign, you're more focused on delivering a strong use case to continue development than over-indexing on your initial code. It may be temporary after all, if you don't get the response you're looking for!
So, how do you decide when you should iterate on your plugin?