Backstage User Roles for Doc

This document provides recommendations for user roles, or personas, for Backstage. The goal here is to identify a working set of distinct user roles around which to organize the Backstage documentation.

The documentation should ultimately be task-oriented, with tasks organized around users and their objectives. A process for creating this type of documentation set is under development in the CNCF Tech Doc GitHub project.

Summary of Proposed User Roles

The following table summarizes Backstage user roles proposed by the Backstage OSS community*. The roles assume the following:

• An organization has software objectives that cannot be met without a centralized solution, and has resolved to commit resources to solving those problems.
• The organization adopts Backstage, setting up a single, central Backstage server instance ("app").
• The organization contains many development groups. These groups can be organized in any manner, but this document assumes a flat organization of small development groups.
• "Development group" refers to any group that produces a software product manageable in Backstage, including but not limited to internal and external toolkits and APIs; components; databases; and web-based and standalone applications.
• The organization has ties to the Backstage open source software project, specifically:
  • One or more engineers who contribute to the project.
  • Developer users who ask questions and participate in discussions, newsgroups, and other community forums.

*Ultimately. This document is a work in progress to be revised by consensus.

User Role	Org Level	Description
Champion	Organization	A combination evangelist/implementer/coordinator dedicated to driving adoption of Backstage at an organization. The champion is vital to removing barriers to developer adoption by, among other things, making the developer experience a delight and by demonstrating Backstage's value.
Administrator	Organization	An IT or DevOps professional responsible for setting up and maintaining an organization's Backstage app. The administrator might or might not also be the Backstage champion.
Internal Integrator	Group or Org	An engineer within an organization who creates or modifies the org's Backstage app (typically by writing or modifying a plugin) to add functionality required by the org. This modification might or might not then be contributed back to the Backstage OSS project.
Group maintainer	Group	A member of a software group responsible for keeping the group's Backstage entries up to date.
End-user developer	Group	The "bread and butter" user of Backstage, an end-user developer is part of a group within an organization that uses Backstage to both learn about and use software components within the org and to publish and document its own software.
Contributor developer	Backstage OSS	A contributor to the Backstage open-source project. Many if not most contributors develop plugins to extend the functionality and integration capabilities of Backstage.
Integrator	Backstage OSS	A contributing developer who develops a plugin that enables Backstage to interoperate with another system.

These roles might overlap; or, in some cases, especially in small organizations, the same person might fill two or more roles. For example, the champion might be the Backstage administrator, and/or might also be responsible for internal integration projects. Or, an integration project might fall to an end-user developer in a group that requires functionality not yet available in Backstage.