Software development team structure, and how it impacts project success

Every product begins with the people. The way you map your business objectives to the roles in a software development team will likely determine your project’s success. Or failure. So, when designing a software development team structure, make sure it reflects such factors as:

Before you step into the recruitment craze, you have to work out the scope of your project. If you’re about to build a product prototype, a team of four may be enough to accomplish the task. But if you’re planning on launching a brand-new application with multiple features and third-party integrations, the number of team members will certainly increase. Here are some ideas of how project scope and a software development team structure may correlate:

How quickly you need to turn your product around will influence the team structure and size, too. Quite obviously, with fewer team members, it may take longer to complete the project. So, if you have an idea of a state-of-the-art product that needs to be developed from scratch and on a tight deadline, you might have to assemble an extended team of senior engineers or a group of full-stack engineers who will be able to cover all needs and deliver results quickly and efficiently.

Being inextricably intertwined with the factors above, the available budget would certainly affect every decision you make — from how many team members you can hire to the seniority of specialists you can bring in to how feature-rich your product can be when turned around. To reduce project expenses without sacrificing quality at the initial stages of development, consider opting for any of the Agile project management methodologies. You could deliver in increments, focusing on high-priority features first, and have more cost flexibility.

Whether you opt for Waterfall or Agile would directly impact your workflows and a software development team structure. A project management methodology you choose to go with shapes up the size of your team, the responsibilities of team members, and the relations within the team. Let’s catch up on the key facts about Waterfall and Agile and see how their peculiarities are reflected in the development team composition.

Setting up the right team is the crucial factor in a project’s success as it is the project team that is responsible for delivering value throughout the project. It’s a common scenario when a company hires a dedicated team but fails to balance roles and responsibilities. For instance, deciding to go without a product owner — the ultimate visioner responsible for crafting a product that meets customer needs — quite often leads to releasing software that fails to win the hearts of its potential users. At a daily operations level, too, one can miss opportunities due to poorly thought-out staffing decisions. A project manager may, for instance, overlook the need for a DevOps engineer, thus, preventing themselves from tapping into numerous benefits. For example, in one of our projects, introducing DevOps helped our customer reduce release cycles from ten to two weeks, implement 30+ new features quickly, and achieve a code coverage of 80%. Mistakes can happen when selecting developers with an appropriate level of expertise. Striving to save budgets, you may feel reluctant to hire senior engineers and opt for less experienced staff. However, to ensure the right proportion of expertise and new perspectives, we would advise staffing your team with both an expert-level developer and those with less experience; the former will ensure technical guidance or even act as a virtual CTO, while the latter would bring fresh ideas to the table.

Evaluate your business goals, the complexity of your project, available budget, and deadlines to make up your mind about a suitable approach to project management. Based on that, estimate the size of your team. If you choose to go with Agile, the perfect team would span four to ten people. Waterfall teams, in turn, are usually quite large and may span up to 15 people. To avoid any management complexities, it may be worth dividing a large team into several sub-teams, each with a lead of its own.

There are three types of team structures — specialists, generalists, and hybrid teams, and each has its pros and cons. When choosing an appropriate team structure, consider this:

If you already have in-house resources, evaluate the skills gaps you need to fill in and search for targeted talent to extend your team. If you start anew, make sure your team is balanced and can cover different aspects of development.

Set up project management software to speed up daily operations and provide for more transparency of the project processes. The most popular project management tools include Jira, Trello, Hive, Smartsheet, and others. And to establish productive communication, encourage using messaging apps, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, as they are simpler and faster to use. Don’t forget about verbal communication, too. Video conferencing and regular project briefings may come in handy in resolving misunderstandings and boosting the quality of communication.