The key goals, objectives and best practices of software development teams

In every software development company or business worth its salt, there is a software development team made up of developers or engineers who apply their technical and programming knowledge and skills to create a software product.

Software projects only move forward when key members of the team work together efficiently and achieve their primary goals. Experienced and competent teams ensure that the product is not only functional, but also intuitive and satisfying to use.

A successful development project requires careful planning, a skilled and talented team to carry out the project, and effective and efficient collaboration among team members – both internal and external.

Software development teams perform many tasks with end users in mind, including market research, user interviews, feasibility studies, product design and prototyping, and testing and maintaining the end product.

A crucial step to the success of these tasks and the overall software development projects is the establishment of a clear and efficient management structure for the development team. Only then can software development teams achieve their primary goals.

3 main goals of software development teams

The main goals of software development teams are based on the commitment to a project to achieve three main goals:

1. Meet the project requirements

In order to meet the needs of a project and achieve this main goal, the team should create a robust software specification but remain flexible to change requests throughout the project. That means:

• Create a common understanding of software among all those involved. In the early stages, business analysts need to conduct on-site workshops with stakeholders and the team to finalize the main concept of the software requirements, the design and architecture, and to ensure everyone is looking in the same direction.
• Have full-fledged change management. In order to process change requests without delays and to avoid breaking existing functionality, each 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 workload. After the changes are implemented, the customer’s stakeholders must perform user acceptance testing for final approval.

2. Keep software quality high

No matter how tight the schedule, the software development team must never accelerate development at the expense of quality. From the beginning, the team should think about quality. For example, ensuring the quality of the project could include these cornerstones:

• code reviews. Part of the development routine should include running automated code reviews to measure the quality of the code, e.g. B. Inheritance depth, class coupling, cyclomatic complexity and code lines. This is to avoid complexity in the code, which becomes a headache for maintaining the software.
• agile culture. Agile principles should be cultivated as a team, which helps deliver quality software in today’s lightning-fast market. The team should focus on sharing responsibility, focusing on speed with quality implications, and understanding the side of the business.
• Continuous testing. As part of the DevOps approach, the development team should establish continuous testing to identify quality risks early before they flow into production.

3. Deliver on time

The recipe for success in terms of adherence to schedules and deadlines has several aspects, especially in long-term iterative projects:

• Automate routine. Custom software developers should be able to automate the entire deployment pipeline within the DevOps approach to accelerate development and ensure smooth integration of new features into the working solution in the future.
• Keep an eye on the continuous progress. To stay focused and plan daily efforts more efficiently, burndown charts could be used to show how close the sprint work scope is to completion. Additionally, to plan for reasonable future iteration workloads, there must be a team velocity chart that reflects the average work done for each iteration. The charts become more reliable as the project progresses, for example after five iterations and more.

Software developers must keep these three key goals in mind when working on projects to ensure success and meet customer needs, while also keeping product and business goals in mind.

Fulfillment of business and software product goals

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

Of course, there are best practices and standards to achieve product development goals, but a common challenge is that software developers may prefer different approaches. In some cases, an approach might not fit well with other members of the development team.

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

• Right – Don’t just build the right product; build it right
• Readable – Readability of the code and documentation are crucial for the maintainability of the project
• reusable – Using generic/existing assets in any form within development shortens development time, increases software productivity and improves software interoperability.
• Reliable
• Flexible
• Efficient
• Expandable

In defining specific business goals of each organization or customer and assigning specific product goals to the development team as a whole and individual team members, the teams should meet the above factors to satisfactorily deliver a product with the required features and value.

Best practices in software development

Best practices development teams should follow when developing software products include:

I. Consistency

Consistency helps a lot as colleagues can test, edit, or continue each other’s work. Projects that don’t harmonize could confuse the team and slow down the process.

Some useful tools for enforcing a style are:

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

II. Simplicity

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

Simpler answers tend to be more correct, and this thought fits perfectly with the needs of the development process. It conforms to the principles of subcoding.

III. maintenance

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

Complex maintenance could remove warnings and keep apps compatible with any hardware. Maintaining fresh code should be a focus to make software work with new devices.

IV. Testing

Testing is essential for every product and every phase of development. From the very first running test to the final evaluations, software should be tested continuously.

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

Finally

Knowing and understanding the primary goals and best practices of the software development team will go a long way toward making your projects a success.