Hire Shopware 6 Developers: 12 Technical Checks CTOs Use

1) Shopware 6 core understanding (not just “plugin tinkering”)

What to verify: They understand Shopware 6 architecture, DAL, Symfony stack, storefront vs admin, and how plugins interact with the core.

Ask for proof: a real plugin repository or code sample (sanitized), plus a short explanation of where they used events/subscribers and services.

Red flags: “We copy an existing plugin and edit it”, “we avoid updates”, “we change core files”.

Interview prompt: “Explain the Shopware DAL and when you would use repositories vs direct queries.”

Helpful reference: Shopware’s official overview of the Data Abstraction Layer (DAL).

2) Plugin quality and upgrade safety

What to verify: clean plugin structure, no core hacks, safe extensions, proper dependency injection, predictable overrides.

Ask for proof: how they handle Shopware updates (staging upgrade, regression checks, rollback plan).

Red flags: no staging environment, no rollback plan, “updates are scary so we don’t do them”.

Interview prompt: “How do you keep customizations compatible across Shopware minor updates?”

Helpful reference: Shopware plugin fundamentals and extension concepts: Shopware Plugins Guide.

3) Storefront expertise (theme, performance, UX)

What to verify: they know Storefront, Twig, the build pipeline, and how to avoid killing performance with heavy custom JS.

Ask for proof: one storefront optimization they shipped (before/after Lighthouse or field metrics).

Red flags: unoptimized images, no caching knowledge, “we’ll add a slider everywhere”.

Interview prompt: “Where do you usually lose LCP in Shopware storefronts and how do you fix it?”

Helpful reference: Google’s official Core Web Vitals thresholds (LCP, INP, CLS): Core Web Vitals.

4) Admin (Administration) customization in Vue.js

What to verify: they can extend the admin cleanly (Vue components, modules, extensions) without breaking upgrades.

Ask for proof: a short demo video or screenshots of a custom admin module they built.

Red flags: “we don’t touch admin”, or “we edit compiled files”.

Interview prompt: “How do you add a custom field workflow and expose it safely in admin and API?”

5) Data modeling and custom entities (DAL done right)

What to verify: they can design custom entities, migrations, indexes, and avoid slow queries under scale.

Ask for proof: how they approach DB migrations and backwards compatibility.

Red flags: no migrations discipline, no indexes, “it works on my machine”.

Interview prompt: “How do you design a custom entity with relations and ensure it performs at 100k+ products?”

6) Integration capability (ERP/PIM/OMS, payments, shipping)

What to verify: real integration experience using Shopware APIs, scheduled tasks, queues, retry and dedupe patterns.

Ask for proof: a high-level integration diagram from a past project (sanitized) showing data flows and failure handling.

Red flags: manual scripts, no retry logic, no monitoring, “we just cron it”.

Interview prompt: “How do you design a resilient order sync to an ERP with retries and deduplication?”

7) Performance engineering (caching, search, bottlenecks)

What to verify: they understand caching basics, profiling, DB tuning fundamentals, and search/indexing tradeoffs.

Ask for proof: a performance checklist they follow (CDN, image strategy, query profiling, caching headers).

Red flags: no profiling tools, guessing instead of measuring.

Interview prompt: “How do you debug slow category pages and prove what’s causing it?”

8) Asynchronous processing (queues, scheduled tasks, indexing)

What to verify: they offload heavy jobs to async, understand indexing behavior, and don’t block checkout.

Ask for proof: an example where they moved a slow process into async (order export, feed generation, reindexing).

Red flags: heavy work inside synchronous checkout requests.

Interview prompt: “What should never run synchronously during checkout and why?”

9) Security and compliance basics (real-world, not theory)

What to verify: secure coding basics, dependency hygiene, access control, admin hardening, secrets management.

Ask for proof: how they handle secrets and what their patch process looks like when vulnerabilities drop.

Red flags: credentials in code, weak admin protection, no patch routine.

Interview prompt: “A critical dependency vulnerability drops today. What do you do in the first 24 hours?”

10) Testing discipline (pragmatic, not academic)

What to verify: basic test strategy: smoke tests, key flows, automated checks where it matters (checkout, pricing, integrations).

Ask for proof: their “definition of done” checklist for releases.

Red flags: no staging testing, no regression list, “QA will catch it”.

Interview prompt: “What are your top 10 regression checks before a Shopware release?”

11) Deployment and CI/CD maturity

What to verify: predictable deployments (build, migrate, clear cache, warm-up) and a rollback plan.

Ask for proof: a pipeline outline and branching strategy.

Red flags: deploying by FTP, no rollback, no versioning.

Interview prompt: “Walk me through a low-risk deployment for a Shopware update.”

12) Observability and incident response

What to verify: logs, error tracking, monitoring, alerting, and how they triage production incidents.

Ask for proof: what metrics they watch (error rate, response time, checkout completion, queue failures).

Red flags: no monitoring, no postmortems, “restart the server” as a strategy.

Interview prompt: “Checkout failures spiked 30 minutes ago. What’s your first 5-step triage plan?”