What is a Dev Team?

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 quite popular. 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.

Agile Dev Team:

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:

Software development teams are not distinguished based on job descriptions such as a 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 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:

Agile believes in no hierarchy within a software development team. There is no need for a ‘team lead’ that 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 it.

In scrum, a software development team is accountable for:

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

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

• Developers have a sense of autonomy and trust.
• There is increased motivation among the software development teams that 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.

Are You Planning to Form a Dev Team for Your Software Project?

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.

Read our other article on how you can build a scrum development team effectively. 

If you, as a business CTO, are still looking for experienced developers to partner with for your software projects, take a look at field-expert teams at DevTeam.Space.

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

Frequently Asked Questions