What is a Dev Team? Roles, Structure, and Agile Practices

Interested in knowing what a dev team is and what the dev team does?

Read our concise guide to get a basic understanding of roles within a software development team.

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In this article

1. Dev Team Explained
2. Agile Dev Team
3. Frequently Asked Questions on Forming a Dev Team

Dev Teams Explained

A dev team or development team is a group of people that includes software developers, data engineers, product managers, QA engineers, business analysts, UX/UI designers, etc.

This team creates, designs, codes, and tests different software products such as mobile, web, and desktop applications, websites, and other complex software solutions and systems for a variety of industries. This includes healthcare, construction, entertainment, gaming, music, and video streaming, energy, manufacturing, and education, among others.

The development team can build software products from scratch (from inception to implementation) or improve the existing product.

Software developers form a development team to create software products and services. They come with technical skills to implement business requirements through software programming.

Today, agile software development is gaining popularity. Software development companies extensively use agile frameworks like Scrum. The reason is an iterative development methodology where developers work and deliver incremental sprints that reduce time-to-market, efficiently meeting consumers’ demands.

Understanding Agile Dev Teams

Developers, engineers, and testers form an Agile development team, a subset of the larger Agile team consisting of a product owner, product manager (scrum master), etc.

Companies may also have an agile coach - a person in charge of creating and improving Agile processes within a software development team.

Such teams are involved in the following activities to deliver quality ‘deployable’ projects:

• Sprint planning;
• Daily Scrum meetings;
• Feature refinement;
• Sprint review meeting;
• Retrospective meeting.

The main characteristics of an agile team are cross-functionality and self-organization. 

Cross-functionality (Cross-Functional Development Team)

Software development teams are not distinguished based on job descriptions such as tester, business analyst, etc. Developers are believed to have all the skills required to deliver a product. If there is a need to test the software code, developers will help out. 

The approach that implies using cross-functional teams may seem to affect the utilization of core developers, but it offers the following advantages to the process at all development stages:

• It reduces the dependency on specific individuals for specific tasks. This also means less time required to coordinate and update different teams.
• It promotes a faster time to market. The senior professional devs are able to realize the feature idea into a working software product within a matter of days.
• There is increased control and visibility for teams.
• Risk management is enhanced.

Self-Organization (Self-Organizing Team)

Agile believes in no hierarchy within a software development team. There is no need for a ‘team lead’ who makes other team members work. The developers are no longer responsible only for delivering their piece of work and reporting issues.

This means the success of the entire development process lies with the whole software development team. Decisions are expected to be made professionally, wherever deemed appropriate, and the entire software development team is accountable for them.

In Scrum, a software development team is accountable for:

• Creating a sprint backlog; 
• Adhering to the definition of done;
• Working towards the sprint goal.

This self-organizing development team leads to the following results:

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• Developers have a sense of autonomy and trust.
• There is increased motivation among the software development teams, which is reflected in the creative ideas and technical solutions.
• As all the team members share accountability, there are fewer chances of substantial failures.
• Increased efficiency - team members do not first report problems to the chain of command and wait for them to resolve issues.

Ready to Assemble Your Software Dev Team?

Software engineering projects can quickly become complex, given the requirements of the user market and the nature of the software development technologies. The one thing you should get right from the beginning to save your resources is to form a competent and professional software development team.

If you, as a business CTO, are still looking for experienced developers or development teams to partner with for your software projects, look no further than expert teams at DevTeam.Space.

DevTeam.Space is an innovative American software development company with an over 99% project success rate. We build reliable and scalable custom software applications, mobile apps, websites, speech recognition systems, ChatGPT and AI-powered solutions, and IoT solutions, and conduct complex software integrations for various industries, including finance, hospitality, healthcare, music, entertainment, gaming, e-commerce, banking, construction, and education software solutions on time and on budget.

Share your initial product specifications with us, and one of our account managers will get back to you to discuss further how our development teams can help you.

Frequently Asked Questions on Forming a Dev Team

Related Articles

Learn more about forming development teams from our helpful guides:

1. Dev Team Roles and Responsibilities
2. How to Manage a Development Team Effectively?
3. How to Build an Agile Development Team?
4. How To Build A Remote Software Development Team?
5. How Many People Does an App Development Team Need to Create a Mobile Application?
6. How Many People Does It Take To Form An NFT Marketplace Development Team?
7. How Many People Does It Take To Form a Mobile Game Development Team?
8. How Many People Does It Take to Form an Online Marketplace Development Team?