An introduction to the software development team and advice to build your team
A software development team is a group of people who have a diversified set of skills that are required to develop a complete software system. Team members apply their engineering and programming knowledge in software development achieving fantastic applications or websites. The efficiency and effectiveness of the developed software depend on the skills of the development team. Let us discuss the hierarchy of the software development team and understand their roles and responsibilities.
If you want to develop a good software system in terms of performance and security, you should hire a well-skilled and experienced development team. A high functioning software development team could have the following roles in them.
A good team of software developers have these experts and with the worthy collaboration of these members, you will get the desired product.
PROJECT OR PRODUCT MANAGER/OWNER
A project or product manager is the person who is responsible for the overall success or failure of the software system. Project or Product managers are the one who is responsible for the successful planning, designing, developing, testing and maintaining of the project. Moreover, he is the one who controls risks and budget of the project along with the in-time delivery.
BUSINESS ANALYST
A business Analyst has a key role in the success or failure of the software system. She communicates with all the team members, stakeholders and with the customers to elicit the requirements. She performs several meetings with the end-user and customer for a better understanding of the functional requirements. Then she pens down these requirements and delivers them to the development team. Moreover, she optimizes the requirements and separates them into functional and non-functional requirements, business rules, limitations, constraints and assumptions. Furthermore, she performs requirements management such as changes in the requirements.
TEAM LEAD
Team leads are actually often not the most technical people in a team. People look up to team leads and they have great decision-making and leadership skills, but sometimes the most talented technical person in your team will lack the leadership or interpersonal skills needed to lead people. That is why there is often a need for a separate Technical lead.
TECHNICAL LEAD
The person leads the technical staff in your organisation and is known as a technical lead. A technical lead needs to have a lot of expertise with programming advancement and a profound comprehension of innovation, yet they should likewise be friendly and able enough to viably lead a group and work together with others. Technical leads are either experts in general software architecture and engineering or subject-matter experts on implementing a specific technology or feature like artificial intelligence, or payments technology, or social network news feed and can be assigned either permanently or on a per-project basis based on its technical requirements. The role of a technical lead is to make sound recommendations on what technologies to use, plan and design the overall architecture of the system, and check the implementation by the developers for correctness based on initial plans.
FULL STACK DEVELOPER
A full-stack developer has expertise in both front end development and back end development. She is the one who can code the complete website or software on his own. A full-stack developer not only designs the software system using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript but also they program the complete backend functionality of the system along with the database. Moreover, they have a huge set of knowledge related to architecture and design patterns. She should know to develop and design RESTful services and APIs.
FRONT END DEVELOPER
As the name suggests, the front end developer should have a grip on front end technologies like HTML5, CSS, BOOTSTRAP, JavaScript, JQUERY and advance knowledge of all. The front end developer is responsible for the development of the user interface and to make it responsive for all the digital devices. They are responsible to develop the visual features through which users can interact with them and perform the specific functionality.
BACK END DEVELOPMENT
Back end developer is responsible for developing web services and APIs that are used by front end developers. A backend developer writes the business logic and develops the backend functionality of the software system. She should know server-side web application logic and integration of the frontend with the backend. A person who is good in making logics and solving problems can efficiently perform this role.
QA LEAD
A Quality Assurance leader (QA Lead) has a vast and important role in the successful delivery of the desired software product to the customer. She is the leader of the software quality assurance department. She defines the quality standards for the development team to make the product of that standardized quality. She creates the benchmark and milestones so that the quality is assured at every possible outcome.
QA ENGINEER
A QA engineer is responsible for the creation of tests to identify issues with software before the product launch. Duties include identifying and analyzing any bugs and errors found during the test phase and documenting them for review after. Other tasks include developing and running new tests, reporting on the results and collaborating with software developers to fix program issues. Depending on the internal organizational structure, QA engineers may progress to a managerial or executive position. A good quality assurance engineer should have a grip on Java, XML, XHTML, Python, and MySQL.
SOFTWARE TESTER
The software tester is responsible for conducting manual testing and automation testing of the software. She is responsible to ensure the quality of the developed software. Software tester verifies and validates the software with the requirements document. She performs unit, regression, system, integration and component testing. She compares the intended behaviour of the software with actual behaviour. Her job becomes successful when she finds as many bugs in the system as she can.
UI DESIGNER
The UI designer works closely with the front end developer as she is responsible to design the pages of the website. Their goal is to make the web pages attractive and user friendly by designing the buttons and other interacting tools. The UI designer is responsible for creating attractive visuals to enhance the customer experience and make them feel cheerful while using the website of a software system. In short, they are responsible to make the website attractive enough for the users so that they will not jump over another site after losing interest.
UX DESIGNER
The main responsibility of the UX designer is to make sure that the user would have the best experience while using the application or a website. They strive for making the user experience as positive as possible while interacting with the software system. Her job is to ensure that each and every visual is placed on the right side. Every functionality is achieved within a minimum number of steps and each process is streamlined so as to make the software time efficient. If any software company has these roles and these roles could perform their job well, then there is no hurdle to develop a good and efficient software system.
DEVOPS ENGINEER
A DevOps engineer is responsible for developing and managing the IT infrastructure used specifically for the development and release of software products. The term DevOps comes from combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). Effective DevOps engineers empower the team by letting them automate the checking and execution of sequences of otherwise error-prone tasks related to the release of software and rolling back mistakes quickly if they happen. They also monitor the traffic and costs of servers and other software services used by a company to make sure it stays on budget while providing suitable performance for its users.
DATA ANALYST/ DATA SCIENTIST
Data analysts and data scientists help the team collect and process relevant data, and apply their knowledge in solving problems by selecting proper methods to investigate and analyse the data collected. For example, they come up with the algorithms used to create recommendation systems that you often see in shopping or video streaming websites. They can also help with running A/B tests and experiments designed to optimise things like traffic and conversion rates, customer satisfaction, or revenue. The difference between a data analyst and a data scientist often comes down to the depth of their technical expertise. An analyst would have enough expertise to work with a database and identify trends, while a data scientist should be able to develop machine learning algorithms for predictive systems.
SECURITY ENGINEER
A security engineer should be able to audit and assess IT infrastructure and software systems for risks and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, security engineers are often tasked to make recommendations and document best practices for security and educate the rest of the team, as well as management. They should also take the lead in applying solutions based on their findings – which can vary from installing firewalls, adding new security features, to redesigning internal processes. They serve as your primary defence to prevent hackers and malicious attacks on your systems and also your auditing and reporting mechanism for when attacks do take place and damage has been done.
DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR
A database administrator manages the performance and security of your stored data. Their specialised knowledge ensures that your systems are writing and retrieving data efficiently, which in large-scale systems, is crucial to maintain good user experience and lower costs. They also control access to stored data, making sure that all access, whether it be by users, employees, and systems are correct and on a need-to-know basis only, and no sensitive data is being leaked. They are also responsible for keeping database software up-to-date with the latest security and performance updates available. It is an important role in every company, but especially important for those that work with large data sets and store sensitive information.
A good interview process starts before the actual interview and follows these general steps:
Let’s walk through a fictional scenario from start to finish. Let’s say you’re trying to build a simple social network website for home cooks to share photos of food:
You think about and visualise your product roadmap. Two years in the future you envision having around 10 million users, a mobile app, and a way to sell products to the home cooks. It feels overwhelming. However, you want to start simple: you only need a website and expect to have 10,000 users in the first 3 months. It’s reasonable to think that 2-3 people with mixed skills can achieve this. You need a Frontend developer, a Backend developer, and a designer. You decide that you’ll take up the role of project manager and QA yourself.
Working on a list of skills you’ll need, and planning to hire just 3 people, you find that you have to cover a few more essential skills: security engineer, data analyst, DevOps engineer, and database administrator. Wanting to stick to your budget, you have to find people that have skill overlaps on these areas as well.
