10 Tips on How to Construct a Capable App Development Team

Having an effective and capable app development team is the key to staying ahead of today’s competitive market. You cannot expect to launch quality products and deliver good user experience – especially in a timely manner – when your own app development team isn’t operating optimally.

There are a lot of challenges associated with constructing a capable app development team. These next several tips and tricks will help you overcome those challenges and craft a development team that can handle the most complex tasks. Let’s get started, shall we?

1. Separate QA

If you think you don’t need a QA engineer, think again. Quality assurance and testing are crucial elements of any development project, no matter how small that project may be. In order to create an effective app development team, you must first separate the process of testing from development.

Separating testing by adding a QA engineer to the team also allows for easier, more effective continuous testing. Codes – and the final product – are tested against a set of requirements and standards, guaranteeing smoother development cycles in the process.

2. Hire a Project Manager

Select a project management methodology and make sure your project manager can handle cycles using that approach. If you don’t have a project manager, now is the perfect time to hire one with good technical and management skills.

Hiring a project manager is only the beginning. You also want to enroll your project manager on the relevant training programs, such as scrum training. This list of Scrum training courses on findcourses.com is worth checking out.

3. Have Senior Developers

As tempting as it may be to have a team of young and agile developers, it is still necessary to leverage the experience of senior developers to make your app development team more effective. After all, development experience is something that cannot be faked.

The experience of senior developers allows the entire team to be more strategic, anticipate mistakes, and think outside the box. Having senior developers fill key roles in the development team – including the role of project manager – enhances the effectiveness of your team by a substantial margin.

4. Develop a Culture

While adding the right team members is important, it is also necessary to make sure that every team member shares the same mindset. You can avoid bottlenecks and eliminate potential issues early when team members work towards mutual goals and rely on a shared passion.

When developing an app with changing requirements, for instance, maintaining morale and anticipating those changes becomes easier when the right culture is in place. In fact, coders can write codes that allow for the changes to be implemented easily from the start.

5. Think About Personality

It is not a secret that not all developers are kind; the competitiveness of the field and how the market is shaped forces a lot of developers to be competitive, but not always in a positive way. When constructing an app development team, make sure you take personality into consideration.

Personality clashes, egos, and certain traits (i.e. lack of passion, low attention to details) could harm the effectiveness of the entire team. Something as simple as a difference in work ethics can also result in unnecessary issues that affect development projects as well as the quality of the team’s work.

6. Invest in Your Team

The project management and scrum training we discussed earlier isn’t the only training worth investing in. As mentioned before, resources like findcourses.com are filled with programs and courses in various fields, including in some popular programming languages and database frameworks.

Investing in your team is how you stay ahead. Team members will feel appreciated, the entire team can grow together, and their performance as a team will increase exponentially. Providing your team with the right training is also how you keep the team up to date with new trends and development approaches.

7. Invest in Tools

At the same time, you want to make sure that your team members have everything they need to perform optimally. Coders don’t always need complex tools, but providing them with a suitable development and test environment, the right laptop, and a fast internet connection works well.

You can also invest in tools that automates mundane tasks. Testing, for instance, can be automated using Firebase or Appium. A collaborative platform like Figma, where developers and designers can work together seamlessly, helps too.

8. Watch Your Timeline

Next, you want to provide the team with a suitable timeframe. No matter how effective your app development team is, it still takes a reasonable amount of time to complete an app properly. Forcing a tighter deadline will only result in a substantial decrease in quality of the app produced.

Another thing to anticipate is function switch. Moving from one development project to another takes time; often longer than anticipated. Developers who work on multiple projects at the same time will show reduced effectiveness, simply because they have to make adjustments when making the switch.

9. Look for a Good Leader

For a startup, that’s a capable CTO. In other environments, the leader of the development team is usually the product manager. Find a leader that can translate business requirements into development requirements, calculate a suitable development time, and communicate those details with the rest of the team.

A good leader affects the effectiveness of a development team substantially. When team members have complete confidence in their leader, they are more likely to stay motivated, even in the most difficult times. It is also up to the leader to guide the team through challenges.

10. Think Outside the Box

Aside from the main development team, there are communities of developers you can count on. Sites like StackOverflow, communities around programming languages, and other resources are always a couple of clicks away. Let team members leverage these resources to boost their performance.

Remember that not all codes need to be written from scratch. There are frameworks and libraries that can also be used, particularly when there is a huge community of developers behind them. Don’t hesitate to improve on an existing library if needed.

Keeping Your Team Effective

Constructing a capable and effective team of app developers is never an easy task. You have to hire the right people, create the right working ambience, and make sure that every team member is on the same page when it comes to development objectives and methodologies.

What’s more difficult than creating a capable app development team is maintaining its effectiveness. Developers don’t always perform the way you want them to. There are challenges that could stump the entire team and hamper the development process.

With the tips and tricks that we discussed in this article, however, keeping your development team effective is not going to be difficult. You have a great leader guiding the team through difficult times. You also have senior developers whose experience and expertise you can leverage.

The last piece of the puzzle is keeping the team together. This is where a positive work environment and competitive rewards play their part. That brings us to the initial point: there are a lot of challenges associated with crafting a capable app development team. Stay tuned for more tips on how to tackle these two challenges right here on Digital Conqurer.