What is a Dev Team?

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

Agile Dev Team:

Software developers, engineers, and testers form an agile dev team, a subset of the larger Agile team; consisting of a product owner, product manager (scrum master), etc.

Dev teams are involved in the following activities to deliver a quality ‘deployable’ software product:

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

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

Cross-Functionality:

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

This cross-functional organization may seem to affect the utilization of core developers, but it offers the following advantages to the dev process:

•  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 the dev teams.
• Risk management is enhanced.

Self-Organization:

Agile believes in no hierarchy within a dev team. There is no need for a ‘dev team lead’ that makes other dev 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 development team. Decisions are expected to be made professionally, wherever deemed appropriate, and the entire dev team is accountable for it.

In scrum, the development teams are accountable for:

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

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

• Developers feel a sense of autonomy and trust.
• There is increased motivation among the dev teams that is reflected in the creative ideas and technical solutions.
• As the whole dev team shares accountability, there are fewer chances of substantial failures.
• Increased efficiency – dev 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 development 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 here on how you can build an agile development team effectively. 

If you, as a business CTO, are still looking for experienced developers to partner with for your software development project, take a look at field-expert dev 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 dev teams can help you.

Frequently Asked Questions