Software development team roles: who will work on your project?

Any project is always aimed at achieving a specific business goal. This can be a production and/or sales increase, costs decrease (procurement, service). Also, it may be a labor productivity increase, product quality improvement, etc.

At the first stage, the roles must be distributed within the team. These roles vary depending on the project type. The more clearly the responsibilities and authorities are described, the better it is for all project participants. Almost every team includes the following specialists.

Project manager

PM controls all stages of the implementation of the tasks. To communicate with the client on technical and organizational issues, he deeply immerses himself in the project and delves into all the nuances of the technical specification.

PM main tasks include:

• Coordinating the work plan and deadlines with the customer.

• Forming, organization, and controlling the teamwork.

• Distributing responsibilities among key participants.

• Monitoring compliances and revising requirements for the software development, meeting the time and budget constraints.

Thus, the project manager is responsible for specifying the client's demands (deadlines, priorities). He clarifies business requirements, coordinates, and controls the team's work, and deals in a case of disputable organizational and technical situations.

Teamlead

The team lead is primarily involved in large-scale projects that require technical management. The following tasks are among his duties:

• Formating a close-knit team and corporate culture.

• Determining the development strategy: formation of the code style, achieving the planned performance, ensuring security requirements, choosing the right architectural solution.

• Distributing tasks between team members, monitoring their implementation, meeting deadlines and other requirements, conducting a code review.

Along with this, the team lead establishes communication within the team, as well as with other specialists, for example, analysts, QA, and designers. He is responsible for ensuring simple issues or those that have already arisen earlier (organizational, technical) are resolved without customer involvement. As a rule, team lead work is necessary for all large projects.

Business Analyst

The business analyst is involved in the project from its first stage, right after the transaction conclusion, and sometimes even before it. A business analyst's primary responsibility is to communicate both with the client and the development team. Customers usually think about their goals first. Programmers, on the other hand, think about functions and code, focusing on how to do what the client wants and solve their problems.

Such a specialist collects the client's requirements regarding the product, analyzes how it should look and what features need to be included in the development, as well as why and how it should be done.

The business analyst also conducts competitor research with marketing professionals to ensure that the product remains in the marketplace and is competitive with existing products. The BA also identifies the target audience of the product, creates custom characters, wireframes, and writes the terms of reference if they were not fully provided by the client. Thus, the role of a business analyst is to plan the optimal development process, interpret customer requirements, prepare documentation, and implement effective communication between the customer and the team.

UI / UX designer

It is generally thought that UI / UX designer is the most creative worker on any project. His main responsibility is to make up a nice interface and a great user experience. The designer uses wireframes created by the client or business analyst to “draw” mockups and design the mobile application interface (UI) according to current guidelines and trends. He also plans a user experience that will make the product usable.

Designers often use InVision to create dynamic prototypes that reflect the behavior and appearance of a future product, allowing them to test the prototype on a real device before starting the development process. The fact that it is convenient for the client to see the application model, and programmers simply need a prototype to write the code.

Developers / programmers

This is the core of the team, people with a specific area of ​​expertise. Programmers are like translators who translate human language and graphic language into the language of digital technologies.

There are different levels in the software development team, including junior, middle, and senior levels, which depend on work experience. Developers also have different areas of expertise, they create code using different languages ​​and work with numerous platforms. That is why there is such a “variety” of programmers involved in one project. For example, a typical mobile application development project requires the participation of at least Android, iOS, and backend developers.

QA

QA (Quality Assurance) specialists are required for every process of developing and ensuring a high-quality product. They test it, go through the entire application identify bugs and errors, and then submit a report to the development team, who fixes them. It is necessary to identify errors before the product reaches users to save the product's face and ensure a positive user experience. Other responsibilities of QA specialists include general testing of the product and its compliance with the stated requirements.

Marketing specialist

Marketing professionals work with a product in the pre-]and post development stage and are necessary for the development of each product unless it is a system that is used exclusively within the company.

Thus, these specialists conduct market research at the first stage of the project, identify the target audience, and study its needs and preferences. Also, marketing specialists prepare and launch campaigns after the product is released, look for distribution channels, do social media marketing, write texts and articles, product descriptions (content marketing), etc. All that is done for ensuring the promotion of the product and its success.

Conclusion

Understanding which specialists are required for a specific project is usually formed at the time of completion of the pre-project analytics. When the scale of the work and the key tasks are known, it is easier to predict future demands. There always is a necessity to consider new requests from the customer for expanding the functionality or supporting product users. Due to the Yojji experience, the team structure described above helps to provide high-quality services and establish processes within the company properly.