Bit includes two key parts —

a) A set of open-source tools that let developers build isolated components, resolve their dependencies, compose them into applications, control the independent build process, version and publish each component, and so on.

b) A cloud platform where all published components are shared, documented, made discoverable, and can be installed into different applications. Through the cloud platform teams can get and release updates to specific components, and learn how every change impacts dependant components in different apps.

By facilitating component-driven development, Bit provides increased speed, scale, and efficiency for the development of modern web applications.

It accelerates the development process through the modular creation and composition of components, it increases the number and pace of team releases, it reduces maintenance costs and overhead through the separation of concerns, and it provides better scalability for both the development process and the organizational structure.

Key advantages of Bit in making web development more efficient include:

Acceleration of web development

Bit greatly speeds the velocity of web development for the organization. It provides teams with the tools to quickly create, compose, upgrade, and manage components in their applications. It helps teams expose and integrate components with each other to build faster together, and brings component reuse up to 100% to save overlapping work. As a result, organizations can reduce time to market and increase the pace of delivery.

Standardization and governance

Bit helps to standardize the development process of components. It gives the organization tools such as customizable component development environments and automated workflows to define and regulate the way components are developed, built, tested and documented by all different teams and in all different applications.

Autonomous teams

Bit lets the organization define a flexible team structure that gives teams true autonomous ownership over their features or products, from development to production. Teams can independently develop components in their own codebases, constantly release innovation, and smoothly expose and integrate components with each other.

Scalable, decoupled codebases

Each team works independently in its own codebase, decoupled from other teams and with full separation of concerns, making each codebase much simpler to build, test and maintain. This gives the organization an improved ability to scale web development in the same sense that micro-services enables to scale back-end development.

More releases to production

Bit helps teams to increase the number and pace of releases to production. It leverages components to free the continuous delivery process of teams from each other, so that each team can constantly release upgrades, changes, or hotfixes multiple times a day. It provides teams with the tools to ensure they will not break anything, or anyone, else. Benchmarked testing shows up to X30 more releases to production by product teams.

Incremental upgrades

Bit prevents version bloating, master-branch wars, and delayed delivery cycles. Instead, it leverages components to allow the incremental release of modular upgrades to production. Unlike legacy techs, Bit does not build changes to an entire monolith. Instead, it only runs on the component dependency-graph, across all applications.

Structuring innovation

A small team empowered to make decisions and relentlessly drive toward their goals will deliver results and insights much more quickly than a larger group. After all, who knows the product’s users and problems better than the team who owns it?

Yet while product teams should be autonomous to deliver innovation, they still need to work together, and comply with the organization’s standards, tools, and guidelines.

Bit provides the organization with the tools to structure innovation. It empowers products teams to rapidly and independently release features and upgrades to production. At the sme times, it provides the organizations with tools to standardize, regulate, and monitor the development and status of components across all different teams and applications.

100% Component reuse and consistency

Bit makes every component in the organization reusable. It gives developers tools to very easily share their components with others, and reuse components shared by other to adopt into their own applications. It provides discoverability, collaboration, and management to independent components at scale to ensure reuse and consistency.

Improved resilience and maintainability

Bit lets organizations enjoy the benefits of building modular software. If something breaks, it will not break the entire application, and it’s much easier to replace, change, or fix it. When component-driven software is built in a modular and managed way, maintenance or changes become much easier, cheaper and less painful to perform.

Eliminating bugs and glitches in production

Bit provides tools to ensure that all component go through a standardized and automated pipeline for common tasks like build, test etc. No component that does not meet the organization’s criteria will ever make it to production. And thanks to Bit’s component-driven build mechanism, developers can know exactly how every change will impact all related components across all the organization’s applications.

Reduction of cost, resources, and effort

Bit saves organizations a great amount of development time, resources, and costs for web development. It reduces the amount of duplicated code in the organization, speeds the delivery of new features, reduces maintenance costs on fixes or changes, and eliminates a long list of tools and resources wasted on legacy problems and setbacks.

UI component explorers: StoryBook and Styleguidist

Storybook and Styleguidist are environments for rapid UI development in React. Both are great tools for speeding the development of your components.

Here’s a short rundown.

StoryBook

Storybook is a rapid development environment for UI components.

It allows you to browse a component library, view the different states of each component, and interactively develop and test components.

StoryBook helps you develop components in isolation from your app, which also encourages better reusability and testability for your components.

You can browse components from your library, play with their properties and get an instant impression with hot-reload on the web. You can find some popular examples here.

Different plugins can help make your development process even faster, so you can shorten the cycle between code tweaking to visual output. StoryBook also supports React Native and Vue.js.

Styleguidist

React Styleguidist is a component development environment with hot reloaded dev server and a living style guide that lists component propTypes and shows editable usage examples based on .md files.

It supports ES6, Flow and TypeScript and works with Create React App out of the box. The auto-generated usage docs can help Styleguidist function as a visual documentation portal for your team’s different components.

Also check out React Live by Formidable Labs.

Differences between StoryBook and StyleGuidist

With Storybook you write stories in JavaScript files. With Styleguidist you write examples in Markdown files. While Storybook shows one variation of a component at a time, Styleguidist can show multiple variations of different components. Storybook is great for showing a component’s states, and Styleguidist is useful for documentation and demos of different components.

Benefits of CDD for dev teams

When leveraging CDD development teams enjoy faster development times, more code reuse, better TDD and a unified consistent UI design system.

People can code with access to components already written, and collaborate on changes. New features or apps just means adjusting and tweaking your base components, and preventing mistakes later discovered in production.

Codesharing also means less code to maintain, so you can focus on building new things. When you build from the components up, you also get everyone aligned on the same page using the same building blocks, so your entire development workflows become standardized and yet remain flexible.

Some teams report up to 60% faster development through modular components based on a UI component design system implemented as React components. Some organization find they can delete ~30% of their codebase by adopting CDD. Uber, Airbnb, Shopify & more are moving to components.

Conclusion

Personally, I don’t think it’s surprising that CDD5 is more effective. As Brad Frost states in Atomic Design, modularity and composition are the basis for efficiency in physics, biology, economy and much more. In software, modularity breeds the same advantages: speed, reliability, simplicity, reusability, testability, extendability and composability. It’s better.

In the frontEnd of our applications, through CDD we also give a consistent UI and expirience for our users throughout our products and features. That makes them love what we build, and feel a bit happier. Everybody wins.

Thanks for reading! 🍻