Since you’ve decided to raise your startup it turns out to be a core task to pick proper specialists into a dedicated software development team. Be ready: during the journey you can face an array of obstacles like misconceptions and lack of experience.
In order to make your “diving” into the world of web and mobile development more comfortable, an experienced software development team shared their vision and practical tips. Leaning on their 7+years experience, guys at Purrweb in a simple and clear manner explain how to build an effective team in an agile approach.
That can be helpful for absolute newbies in the industry insofar as assists to structure knowledge about team members’ duties and most significant processes in software development.
What are three significant things in software development in Agile?
Apart from the Waterfall approach characterized with performance of separate individuals, an agile software development team works like a well organized unit with crossing functions. Due to multitasking this type of management ensures a high level efficiency and rapid pace in creating deliverables. In dependency from the project scale and its complexity the agile management requires from teammates different sets of skills and level of expertise.
In the article about building a software development team you can read in detail about three ways to organize agile teams and to learn how it actually goes.
But regardless of the project scale and its complexity an efficient software development team needs to have these three features.
The first necessity is excellent communication. Yes, it’s not enough just to do your duties. Communication skills of all teammates determine whether the business goals will be achieved. Willingness and ability to listen to each other, customers, startup owners shape the efficiency of effort of the whole team. The more precisely software developers can catch the startup idea and task the more outstanding product they can deliver. As far as deep understanding drives innovations.
The second required thing in software development is to have enough level of expertise onboard. That means your team unites people with complimentary hard skills that are sufficient to complete the task. For example, if the project is very simple it’s enough to hire a single full stack developer with a diverse background to complete the task. But if you intend to launch a successful app or MVP it makes sense to search for a software development team where everyone has his own expertise in a definite domain and can make precious input in common results.
Depending on the business task the software development team can include members with profound knowledge in the field if required as well as members with a wide range of skills and abilities to multitasking. Remember: you don’t need to hammer in nails with a microscope. That means you don’t need for every task to hire only highly qualified developers. As far as it is costly. Search for appropriate executors. So you won’t have to overpay for simple work.
And the third key to success is experience.
You can set excellent details together but to confirm the mechanism works smoothly they should interact for a while. The similar thing happens in the agile teams.
When we are talking about high speed and efficiency in a software development team we mean well adapted teammates with high level mutual comprehension during interaction. All this gives that synergistic effect that makes the Agile management in software development so demanded.
Who does a productive software development team consist of?
While you are making out the details of your startup idea, let us get you acquainted with the particular roles that team players used to perform in the agile team.
If you’re afraid of speaking with developers in a «foreign language», put your fears aside. Dealing with a professional agile team you will communicate with the account manager. His talent allows him to translate all specific things into simple human language. Due to his high communication skills you will be always aware of development process stages and get enough attention to all your ideas and desires.
Behind the abbreviation PO is hidden the team player who knows all about the final version of the product. The responsibility of a product owner is to respond to software development team inquiries concerning ideas, target audience, and specifics during the development process. The product owner also impacts on the plan of work.
Often this role is played by clients or their representatives: who knows about project ideas better?!
Another abbreviation PM means project manager. You can also name him/her guru of time management and communication. The role pointed in literature as Scrum master ensures everything went in accordance with plan. Project manager must control whether the completed work matches up the project idea and whether all the tasks within iterations are finished on time. In cases of any misconceptions or disruption of working flow PM does all his best to avoid any obstacles further.
Since user experience is a cornerstone of product success it requires to involve several
UI/UX professionals into software development process. While the UX designer builds the architecture of the project in accordance with the inner logic of the prospect, the UI designer conjures over visual presentation in order to give the user the shortest way to troubleshoot.
To create the interface easy to use there is a part of work for UI/UX copywriters. They prepare short but very informative texts where required. Thanks to the cooperative work of these guys a website or an app becomes very simple and convenient to make use of the app.
Software developers turn technical requirements into working functions, test them and check their workability. An effective team usually consists of several masters of code writing. Different tasks require different sets of skills and expertise levels. Some guys specialize in back-end development, some are good at frontend. And only few are able to encompass all sides of the project. They are known as full stack developers.
Testing is an essential part of work to be sure everything is done well. That’s why you can’t imagine a properly built team without
quality assurance engineers. Testers explore the specifications of the project to prevent bugs in the app, fix them if they are discovered. They are responsible to check that the solution works as needed every time a new piece of code is added. That helps to avoid any tremendous problems in the final stage of software creation.
From this overview you can catch what a full-functional software development team is and how tricky to find appropriate participants might be.
What the alternative is
If you feel frightened with the necessity to hire so many specialists, check their portfolio and qualifications, test them and try to build a new team, you can sneak on another path. In some cases it seems to be beneficial to hire an experienced software development team on outsource. The pros of this approach are obvious: you deal with people who can work
dynamically due to well-established connections, processes, common experience leading to synergistic effects. You can be sure these guys don’t need babysitting. The outcome in this case is more predictable: the possibility to get a high fidelity software product increases several times.