Determining the structure of a software development team can be seen from several factors. That is from the type and complexity of the software to be developed, the budget allocated to the product, and the time you have until the product launch.
To make each development team member perfect, you should carefully analyze the required team size and choose the team structure that best fits your project, whether it be specialist, generalist, or hybrid. Another thing to ensure is that you have all the roles of the software development team covering every function and role in developing your product.
To be more precise, you will be invited to explore the key factors behind determining the structure of a software development team, knowing who should be involved in the team, and getting to know the roles of each team member. Let’s take a dive into the article.
Factors Behind Determining the Structure of A Software Development Team
Type & Complexity of Your Project
The first step you should take is to know the scope and scale of your project. This will help you determine the size of the team you will need. For example, if you are going to prototype a product, then a team of four people is sufficient to complete the project.
On the other hand, if you plan to launch a new application equipped with many features and third-party integration, your team scale will increase. To have a better idea of the scope of the project and the structure of the software development team, here are some ideas that you can refer to:
Budget Allocated to Development
Budget is also a determining factor in deciding the structure of your development team, from how many team members you can hire, to how many senior specialists you can bring in.
To reduce project costs without sacrificing the quality of the products developed, consider choosing one of the Agile project management methodologies. With Agile methods, you can give focus gradually, starting with high-priority features first and features that have more cost flexibility.
Time You Have to Complete The Project
The amount of time you have to complete your project will ultimately affect the structure as well as the size of your team. Obviously, with the long time you have, you can hire a few team members, while you have to bring in more team members in a short time. The larger the team size, the faster your project will be completed.
So, you will develop a great product in a short timeframe. Therefore, you must put together an expanded team of senior engineers or a full-stack group of engineers capable of meeting workforce requirements and speeding up the project.
What Are The Roles of Each Team Member of Software Development?
As mentioned above, team members in software development usually consist of a business analyst, a product owner, a project manager, a product designer, a software architect, software developers, software testing engineers, test automation engineers, and a DevOps engineer. This time we will briefly study the roles of each team member, namely:
Business Analyst
A business analyst translates abstract product ideas into a series of real products by exploring customer workflows. For example, what customers need and want, as well as analyzing stakeholder feedback to formulate the ideas they want to finally align the customer’s vision with the product produced by the development team.
Product Owner
A product owner will bear the responsibility for the product’s success because the product owner is the decision maker. Their main task is to balance business needs and market trends. From there, they must determine the market strategy that must be taken, define the vision of the product they are working on, and ensure the product can meet customer needs.
Project Manager
The project manager distributes tasks to all development team members, plans work activities and determines project status. In Agile projects, the project manager motivates team members, encourages communication, and improves software development.
UX/UI Designer
In designing a software product, there are two aspects: UX or User Experience and UI or User interface. For UX to play a role in thinking about how users interact with the product being developed, UX must do user research, persona development, information architecture design, prototyping, and more. Meanwhile, a UI must design an intuitive interface, easy-to-use software, and of course, please the user’s eye when using the product.
Software Architect
You will need a software architect to develop complex or massively updated outdated software. A software architect decides which services and databases should work together, how interactions should work, and ensures the product is secure and stable.
Software Developer
Software developer certainly plays an important role in the software development team. They do the actual work and code the application. There are two types of software developers: front-end developers who create parts of the application that interact with users and back-end developers who implement the application’s core, namely algorithms and business logic.
Software Testing Engineer
As the name suggests, software testing engineers certainly play a role in testing the software being developed. But does the application meet the requirements? Both functional and non-functional.
Test Automation Engineer
Like a software testing engineer, a test automation engineer also performs testing. The difference is test automation engineers develop small programs that can provide feedback regarding the quality of an application developed without human involvement.
DevOps Engineer
DevOps Engineers are in charge of automating the software delivery process and helping to balance rapid changes to applications and keep them stable.
Conclusion
From the article above, you can conclude that in determining who should be involved in the development team, you can pay attention to three factors: the type of your project, the budget allocated, and the time you have. These three factors will guide you in attracting team members. Although each member who will be hired can be tailored to the needs of your project, of course, you already know the role of each member who is usually involved in the software development team. And you already understand how to structure a software development team for the project. In the following discussion, we will talk about how to hire an offshore software development team.
