4 Phases Of Building A Successful Development Team

As the IT-industry evolves, more and more development teams enter the scene. It creates a truly competition-driven environment, which forces project managers around the industry to seek more optimal, more advanced approaches to building development teams.

Here at TekkSoft, we've discovered a project management system - alternative to conventional approaches - that demonstrates outstanding performance while remaining cost and time-effective. Let's find out how to build a successful development team in 4 phases.

Phase 1. Preparation: Establish Requirements And Project Priorities

You want to spend some time planning your moves before diving into actual product development. Let's consider the preparation aspects in detail.

Establish Clear Requirements

The key to meeting your commitments lies in setting clear project goals, deadlines, and requirements. Assess market risks and research the competition in your niche to come up with a clear understanding of the situation.

Decide On Project Priorities

We all know how hard it can be to find a balance between cutting costs and implementing fascinating functionality. Here are the tips on establishing project priorities:

• Opt for extended functionality if you need to get a competitive advantage over rivals. In case you are not a pioneer in the industry, make sure to distinguish your product with innovative approaches and features;
• Lean towards budget and deadlines improvement if the time to market is a concern. Faster and leaner dev cycle means more chances to be the first and the most valuable contributor to a niche. 

Here’s the thing: there is no universal decision on your project priorities. Research the market and figure out what's best for you.

Phase 2. Creating A Team Core

Now that you decided on the project terms, deadlines, and budget, let's get down to creating a core of your development team. First things first, do not skimp on building a team foundation. Here are the reasons for it:

• The solution core is a foundation for all your future modules. Weak high-level scaffold leads to the poor performance of the system, regardless of the future development quality;
• Solution core architecture sets the development direction for years to come. This phase determines whether you'll spend your time delivering outstanding products or fixing bugs in your solution's core. 

As for the team members, 1 - 2 middle+ specialists are often enough to meet the challenge. You want to hire experienced professionals you can trust the future of your product.

Phase 3. Extending Your Team: Introduce New Team Members For Performance Increase

As soon as your solution core is ready, it is time to move to the next project stage: enhancing your product with crucial features and functionality.

 As you may have guessed, a couple of developers can't cope with that. This is why it is time for extending your team.

Introduce 2 - 3 Junior-to-Middle Developers

You may discover broad and simple yet time-consuming functionality you need to implement, as you get down to developing end user-related features. This is where junior developers come in handy. They are the aspiring specialists perfect for bringing countless small features to life.

Bring 1 -2 QA Specialists To Your Team

Quality assurance is integral to delivering robust solutions timely. This is the primary reason why you need several QA specialists to put your testing routine on track. 

As your performance requirements grow, add more members to your team and strive to balance workforces in your project to push the cost-effectiveness to the limit.

Phase 4. Scaling Up: Increase Your Development Power

As soon as your product enters the large market, the company needs more and more developers to manage the ever-increasing demand for new functionality. This is the time for scaling up your software product development. Here's how you can extend your teams while maintaining the same expertise:

1. Discover the most experienced specialists in your team. Even the junior developers you've introduced to a team in the previous phase may already have solid expertise in your business domain;
2. Build new development teams based on existing specialists. Use your developers as seeds for creating new development teams. This way, you create your teams from new developers while maintaining a high business knowledge level across the company.

Here at TekkSoft, we believe that scaling up your software in step with your business is key to staying competitive in the nowadays rivalry-driven IT-market.

The Bottom Line

The software product development approach we have considered aims to cut your expenses in the late project phases by heavy investments in solution scaffold quality and best practices enforcement. 

If you are looking for professional assistance in software development, reach out to TekkSoft. We are a team of experts fueled for success. Here are the software product development aspects we can help you with:

• Finding the most reliable engineers for your project. We find the best people in the industry to bring your solution to the next level;
• Organizing advanced project management. We have extensive experience in managing IT-project and are ready to implement the best practices into your product development;
• Creating an environment for efficient knowledge sharing. Sharing business knowledge is a must. With that said, we don't just establish internal communication, we build a system for boosting your employee expertise;
• Scaling up your development teams. Extending dev teams is rarely an intuitive task. We make sure you grow your development department in the most efficient way possible. 

Stay motivated and focus on delivering value to this world. This way, success will always be just a matter of time.