Software Development Teams: Principal Goals, Objectives & Best Practices

In any software development company or businesss worth its salt, there is a software development team comprising of developers or engineers that apply their engineering and programming knowledge and skills to build a software product.

Software projects move forward only when the key members of the team work efficiently together and meet their primary goals. Experienced and skilled teams make sure that the product is not only functional, but also intuitive and satisfying to use as well.

A successful development project requires careful planning, a skilled and talented team to execute the project, and effective and efficient collaboration of team members –both internally and externally.

Software dev teams perform many tasks with end-users in mind, including market research, feasibility analysis, user interviews, product designing, prototyping, testing, and maintaining the final product.

A critical step towards the success of those tasks and overall software development projects is establishing a clear and efficient management structure for the development team. Only then can software development teams meet their primary goals and objectives.

3 Primary Goals of Software Development Teams

The principal objectives of software development teams are premised on commitment to a project with a view to achieve three primary goals:

1. Meet the project requirements

To meet the requirments of a project and achieve this key goal, the team should build a robust software specification but remain flexible for requests of change all throughout the project. That means:

• Ascertain a shared understanding of software among all involved. During the initial stages, business analysts have to do on-site workshops with the stakeholders and the team to finalize the software requirements’ major concept, the design and architecture, and make sure that everyone is looking towards the same direction.
• Have a full-fledged change management. To take care of change requests with no delays and avoid impacting the existing functionality, every change request should be reflected in the business proposal format, and added to the project roadmap. The business proposals include the goals, project effect, time estimate, and amount of work. After changes were implemented, the customer stakeholders must do user acceptance testing for the final approval.

2. Keep software quality high

No matter how tight the timeline may be, the software development team must never accelerate development at the expense of quality. From the very beginning, the team should think about quality. For instance, safeguarding the quality of the project could include these cornerstones:

• Code reviews. A part of the development routine should include running automated code reviews to measure the quality of code, like Depth of Inheritance, Class Coupling, Cyclomatic Complexity, and Lines of Code. This is to steer clear of complexity in code that brings headaches to the maintenance of the software.
• Agile culture. The Agile principles should be nurtured in the team, which helps deliver quality software in the lightning-speed market today. The team should focus on sharing responsibility, focus on speed with impacting quality, and understand the side of the business.
• Continuous testing. In the DevOps approach framework, the development team should establish continuous testing to find quality risks early on, before they flow to production.

3. Deliver on time

When it comes to meeting deadlines and on-time delivery of projects, the recipe for success has a couple of aspects, particularly in long-term iterative projects:

• Automating routine. Custom software developers should be able to automate the entire delivery pipeline within the approach of DevOps to hasten the development and ensure a smooth new functionality integration with the working solution in the future.
• Keeping track of continuous progress. To remain focused and plan daily efforts in a more efficient manner, burndown charts could be used that showcase how close there are to completing the scope of work of the sprint. Furthermore, to plan reasonable future iterations workloads, there must be a team velocity chart that reflects the average work finished for every iteration. The charts get more reliable as the project progresses, for instance after five iterations and onwards.

Software developers must keep these three major goals in mind when working on projects to deliver on the requirements of the clientele, keeping in mind the product and business objectives as well.

Meeting Business and Software Product Objectives

The main objectives and purpose for a software product may be easy to understand and straightforward for those involved, but they are not always easy to meet. This is because of the numerous approaches to the development process that may apply, and so many possible outcomes.

Of course, there are best practices and standards to help meet product development objectives, but a challenge that often arises is that software developers may prefer different approaches. In some instances, an approach may not mesh well with other members of the development team.

Fortunately, there are important and specific factors to any successful software development project that teams should strive for to better meet product objectives. Everyone who designs, develops, tests, or maintains software should ensure the software product is:

• Correct - Don’t just build the right product; build it right
• Readable - Code readability and documentation readability are critical to project maintainability
• Reusable - Using generic/existing assets in some form within development shortens development time, increases software productivity, and improves software interoperability.
• Reliable
• Flexible
• Efficient
• Extendable

So, when defining specific business objectives from each organization or client, and alloting specific product objectives to the development team as a whole and the individual team members, teams should meet the above factors to deliver a product satisfactorily with required features and value. 

Best Practices in Software Development

Some best practices development teams should adthere to when developing software products include:

I. Consistency

Consistency helps a lot since colleagues could test, edit, or continue each other’s work.  Projects that do not harmonize could make the team confused and could slow the process down.

Some useful tools to help enforce one style include:

• ESLint: A linter that’s based on Node.js that’s extremely customizable.
• JSCS: A formatting tool and linter of JavaScript.
• HTML Tidy: Another HTML linter that also determines errors.
• Editorconfig: A unification of a code system written with various IDEs.
• Stylelint: CSS linter for different plugins.

II. Simplicity

Software development should be made in simple and the most efficient way possible, minus unnecessary complexity.

Usually, simpler answers are more correct, and this thought meets the development process requirements perfectly. It corresponds with the minor coding principles. 

III. Maintenance

Software, unlike physical entities, has the potential to become immortal. However, this would be possible only if there’s good maintenance, like regular updates, more testing, and analysis. You have probably seen a warning before about incompatible apps in your device.

Complex maintenance could remove alerts and keep apps compatible with any hardware. Maintaining fresh code should be the focus, for software to work with new devices.

IV. Testing

For any product and any stage of the development, testing is essential. From the very first Run test to the final evaluations, software should be tested continuously.

With the advent of modern approaches and machine learning, software engineers and developers have access to robust tools, including automated algorithms for running millions of tests fast.

In conclusion

When you know and understand the software development team's primary goals, objectives, and best practices, it will go a long way in ensuring the success of your projects.