Managing the Organized Chaos That Is Software Development

Mohamed El-Geish
AI-Assisted
Published in
5 min readSep 21, 2020

Photo Credit: Startup Stock Photos from Pexels

Disclaimer: This article is written mostly by GPT-3 given the first paragraph as a prompt; a few edits were made for style and clarity.

Complex software projects require a level of discipline to ensure meeting deadlines and hitting milestones on time; however, software development is a creative process as well that calls for flexibility and leeway for experimentation. Software organizations need to strike that balance well to stay innovative and effective at the same time — you may call it organized chaos.

Software development projects can be chaotic, especially if you don’t know what to do. If you ask any software developer about their experience, you’ll likely hear one of two things: “I have no management skills,” or “I don’t have enough time to manage my team.” What if you could manage your software development team in such a way that it would be smooth sailing? You can. Here’s how. Start the project on time If you miss your deadline, you’re not going to get a second chance to win your client’s trust. And that’s no good. It’s easy to think that you have time management skills, but in reality, as soon as you start a project, you’re already behind schedule. If you don’t start on time, you’ll be in trouble from the get-go. So, what can you do? Start off on the right foot by creating a realistic schedule with the help of a project management tool. Get a better understanding of the project by using a requirements management tool. Involve your team in the planning process to give them ownership over the project. Make sure that you have a few sprints that cover your project’s most important features and make room for spike tasks. Manage your team well You don’t have to be a micromanager to manage your team well. In fact, the opposite is true. You need to do a few things to create the ideal software development team.

The Ideal Software Development Team

The ideal software development team is made up of members who are clear experts in their specific domains. The team should have a sharp business focus, and members should understand how the different pieces of their work fit together to achieve business goals. A software development team should have solid project management support and should be able to work internally with little…