Finalizing the UI Tech Stack & Starting Estimation: A Practical Guide for Enterprise UI Projects

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Launching an enterprise-grade frontend application always begins with two pivotal decisions: choosing the right tech stack and estimating the effort to build it. This blog post documents how we finalized the tech stack for a greenfield SPA project focused on cloud cost optimization, and the challenges of starting estimation without detailed functional inputs.

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📦 Project Snapshot (Sample)

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🧱 Tech Stack Finalization: Why React + Next.js?

After evaluating Angular, Vue, and React ecosystems, we chose React with Next.js for the following reasons:

✅ Key Reasons

• Maturity & Popularity: React has a rich ecosystem, strong community, and internal adoption.

• Flexibility: With or without SSR, Next.js provides scalability options.

• Component Reusability: Helps in building modular, testable UI layers.

• Visualization Support: Works seamlessly with libraries like D3.js, Recharts, Highcharts.

• Easy Integrations: Perfect for embeddable chatbots, analytics, and API-based content.

• Performance: Supports static and hybrid rendering for better performance tuning.

• CI/CD Friendly: Works well with GitHub Actions, Vercel, GCP, or AWS pipelines.

❌ Why Not Angular or Vue?

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🔢 The Estimations – and Why It’s Not Straightforward

We suppose to do the estimations for a list of tasks like:

• Setting up the framework, IDE, and version control

• Building login and onboarding flows

• Integrating APIs for AWS cost data and optimization

• Handling loading, error, and success states

• Writing unit and integration tests

• Deploying the app to production

However, providing realistic estimates at this stage is premature, because...

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⚠️ Why We Can’t Estimate Yet

1. Lack of Detailed Inputs

We currently do not have:

• Final wireframes or mockups

• Defined navigation structure

• Known API contracts or backend payloads

• Clarity on number of components or their complexity

• UX behavior for edge cases or state management

2. Planning Requires Time

Effort estimation is not guesswork. It demands:

• UX walkthroughs

• Task decomposition

• Risk assessment

• Design and testing strategy planning

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✅ Proposed Next Steps for Responsible Estimation

Here’s a practical and professional way forward:

🟣 Step 1: Discovery Phase / Workshop

Invite stakeholders, UX designers, and tech leads for a joint session to:

• Review user journeys

• Walk through wireframes and navigation

• Discuss use cases and integration points

🟢 Step 2: Break Work into Components

After the workshop:

• Break each screen into atomic components

• Tag components as reusable vs unique

• Note expected interactions, validations, charts, and dynamic behavior

🔵 Step 3: Estimate Bottom-Up

Once the scope is clear:

• Estimate per component or flow

• Roll-up to page-level and module-level

• Add test, review, and deployment effort

• Include buffer for unknowns and feedback iterations

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🧰 Tools & Frameworks to Support Estimation

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💡 Final Thoughts

Jumping into effort estimation too early might seem productive — but in reality, it introduces misalignment, over-promising, and confusion later on.

Let’s do this right:

• First finalize UX and flows.

• Then define components and integrations.

• And finally, provide confident, justifiable estimates.

That’s how we build better software and stronger teams.

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📢 Do you agree with this approach? Have you faced a similar challenge when starting a new frontend project? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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Tags: #react #nextjs #frontend-architecture #estimation #cloud #enterprise-apps