Choosing the right team for your startup development is one of the essential challenges you will face on your way. However, the better team you choose, the higher chances of the project’s success are. In this article, we will find out what makes a good product development team, what is the software development team structure and what agile development team roles you need for your project creation.
What Makes a Good Development Team?
According to the WORK TEAM EFFECTIVENESS research, “Teams provide diversity in knowledge, attitudes, skills, and experience, whose integration makes it possible to offer rapid, flexible and innovative responses to problems and challenges, increasing employee productivity and improving the satisfaction of those making up the team.”
However, this definition applies to the perfect picture of the world, and not all the product development teams are able to deliver the specific values that will help with core project problem-solving. What’s more, the necessary skill set of each of the team members is not the only factor that makes an agile development team effective.
Below is what makes a good development team.
- Creativity. The ability to solve the old problems in new and creative ways is essential for the competitiveness of the final project. Thus, your dedicated development team should be creative and open-minded - in fact, these are the main drivers of innovations.
- Common goal. The presence of a common and clear goal is one more driver for the successful development of a tech startup. That’s why corporate culture and team-building matter even in remote teams who work with different customers but become united by the common goal each time there is a need to create a new project.
- Cohesion. When there is a common goal, the team becomes cohesive. So, these two points are closely interconnected.
- Collaboration. The common goal and cohesion drive collaboration, i.e. real efforts towards achieving the final goal while staying cohesive with each other.
- Commitment. The common goal also makes no sense without commitment - the inner feeling of belonging to the production of value. That’s why successful tech startups have a mission, principles, and values that they share not only with their customers but with their tech teams as well.
- Communication. Good development teams have well-established communication practices that allow them to effectively share ideas, suggestions, and insights, plus stay in touch with the customer.
- Continuous improvement. This is one of the core principles of Agile development, and that’s why an Agile development team should always strive for continuous improvement and delivering more final value.
Three Ways to Gather a Development Team
There are four ways to structure the software development team. Let’s find out the pros and cons of each.
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In-house. |
Extended team |
Freelance |
Outsourcing |
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Pros |
Having your Agile development team under your roof allows for efficient communication and better control. You may |
This is a good strategy to use if you have a talent shortage but don’t want to inflate your in-house development team. Extended it dedicated team model allows for quickly solving non-core development tasks and may be suitable for short and long-term collaboration depending on the project specifics. |
Gathering a dedicated development team on freelance terms is the cheapest way to get started with your project creation. Also, you may choose from the global talent pool and come up with flexible and favorable conditions for your freelance team. |
Outsourcing your software development tasks is considered to be the most effective way to create tech projects. It allows for saving time and money at once since you will use the services of an already gathered and cohesive team with the experience in your niche. |
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Cons |
An in-house development team is the most expensive and time-consuming way of software development team structuring. You should deal with human resources, financial and organizational issues on your own. You will also have to invest in your software development team retention in order to save the costs on the attraction of new team members. |
The only cons of this model are that you may spend a lot of time looking for the extended team service provider who will be able to match the extended team with your in-house one. |
Managing a remote development team of freelancers may be quite challenging since you will need to control each stage of team development and each milestone of your project creation. |
The main cons of outsourcing as a way to gather dedicated development teams are possible mentality issues, language barriers, and some communication issues, however, all of them are easy to solve by choosing the right development vendor for your project creation. |
What Are the Advantages of a Dedicated Team?
Creating your project with the help of the dedicated team provided by the outsourcing vendor has a lot of benefits for your future app. Below are the main ones:
- Flexibility. Dedicated teams are quite flexible units. Thus, if the project requirements and the development course change, you will be able to restructure your dedicated team and make them ready to meet new challenges.
- Focus on the project. Remote development teams are also project-specific since outsourcing this task allows for gathering a team according to the current needs of the customer. For example, the SPD Group development team has hands-on experience in gathering tech teams that will help to close knowledge, skills, and talent gaps and create a high-end software project on outsourcing terms.
- Cost-effectiveness. Even despite the fact that dedicated development team contracts are the most expensive compared to the Time and Material, and Fixed Price contract, this investment pays off in the long run since Agile development teams are the best choice for creating large and competitive projects.
- Opportunity for long-term collaboration. Dedicated development teams are the most suitable in the case of large-scale projects that need a lot of time to be created. In this case, the Agile development team makes most sense since you will be able to manage the process of your project creation taking market dynamics and business environment changes into account.
What Are Software Development Team Roles?
As a rule, the software development team structure looks in the following way. However, because of the flexibility and the opportunity to close the talent gaps and hands shortage with the help of this business model, each software development structure is always project-specific and may have additional members.
- Product owner
- Project manager
- BA
- Tech lead
- Team lead
- Designers
- Developers
- QA specialist and testers.
What Is the Best Way to Choose a Web Development Team?
Here is how to find and gather a dedicated development team that will be able to add value to your project.
- Define your project specifics. The more specific requirements to your project development you will have, the easier it will be to hire the right dedicated team.
- Consider outsourcing as the most time and money-saving way. Time and money are both the most valuable resources for any business, and software development is no exception. Outsourcing your software creation allows you to use the services of a ready-made team while getting rid of any organizational issues.
- Choose the most suitable outsourcing destination. There are a lot of destinations to outsource to, however, you can’t afford to make a mistake with it. For example, outsourcing to the Far East allows for cutting costs significantly, however, the final product quality doesn’t always meet the customer expectation. Thus, it is better to stick to the middle ground and choose the countries where the outsourcing services quality fits the reasonable price. For instance, you may consider Ukraine - one of the top-recognized outsourcing destinations in the world.
- Make a list of reliable vendors. You may come up with this list with the help of Clutch.co. This is quite a reliable b2b platform the reviews of which are likely to be credible.
- Choose the most suitable dedicated software development company. There are a lot of factors that point to the suitability of the particular company. The experience in developing solutions for your niche is one of them. Also, pay attention to the companies with the quick response time since this is the sign of a customer-centric approach and good communication practices. You may also ask the company to sign an NDA even before the first consultation (reliable companies will never refuse) and make the first estimate of your project cost. Then, ask for a meeting with your team online and make sure you are on the same page with them.
Conclusion
Thus, software development team structure may differ depending on the project needs, plus there are several ways to gather such a team for your software creation. Tech solutions development outsourcing is the most effective way to get started with your app building since it allows for saving time and money at once.
FAQ
How to structure a development team?
Be guided by the specifics of your project and get started by defining the software development team roles you need to successfully cope with its creation. Next, share this list with your development vendor and ask for competent advice on what professionals do you need to hire for your project’s success.
What is the extended IT dedicated team model?
This model allows for strengthening your in-house team with third-party specialists. As a rule, this model is used for short-term cooperation, however, it may be used in the long run as well when the in-house team is complemented with the outside specialists accurately.
What are the benefits of a remote development team?
The main advantages of a remote development team refer to the opportunity to choose from the global talent pool, stay flexible if the project requirements change, and cut costs without losing efficiency.
How would you increase the efficiency of your development team?
If you need to increase the efficiency of an in-house development team, the best practices include boosting team spirit, providing more flexible conditions, for example, work from home, and reduce the number of unnecessary meetings.
Depending on the team of developers we hire we can enhance or destroy the effectiveness of the SDLC model that our organization has chosen for its development.So hiring is not something secondary but very important for the company.
But curriculum summaries are not always transparent and do not always give the information necessary to make a decision.
How to hire a development team when it is so difficult to assess its technical quality on just one printed sheet.
