3 Things to Demand From Your Software Development Team
Choosing Communication, Experience and Organization
Whether you’re looking to build a new software product or are already in the process of doing so, there are three key elements you should consider when working with your development team.
Here’s a quick guide on the main three:
1. Transparency & Proper Communication
When it involves client relationships, not having full transparency and communication will never go well for either party involved.
And yet, we’ve seen this issue time and time again with our clients’ prior relationships.
It doesn’t matter if your software team is in the next state over, on a foreign beach, sitting a few desks down or asleep seven timezones away. What matters is that they communicate with you.
In order to ensure proper communication channels for our clients, we use the following tools. Perhaps you should consider using these if your team is having trouble in this area:
- Jira — this tool is fantastic for managing tasks and bug lists, Agile sprints, and allowing our clients to see fully into the scope of work in front of us.
- Slack — obviously a big boy here, we use Slack almost religiously. We love having client #channels where they can ask quick one-off questions (and less emails means happier developers).
- Sketch & Invision — we combine these tools for building wireframes, layouts and prototypes. Our clients love be able to click through their app as if their using it before any actual code is ever written. This visualization ensures collaboration and that everyone is on the same page.
- Gitlab — this is an obvious one, but having a proper code version manager is essential. If your software team doesn’t have something simple to use like Gitlab or Github, they’re wrong.
- Reporting & Time Tracking Software — we have our own in-house tool for tracking hours and reconciling on employee time entries. Toggl works great too.
2. Diverse Knowledge & Experience
Having a software team with a diverse background and deep understanding of various industries is a huge bonus when it comes to using a software development team.
At CrateBind, for example, our employees’ backgrounds include not just technology and software, but also private equity, petroleum engineering, homebuilding, non-profits and education.
Not only are backgrounds important, but industry knowledge is a must have, as well.
If your team is niche and hails from a single industry, then expect them to know practically as much as you do about the market your business is in. But if your team has worked on projects in a variety of industries, that’s good too! Just understand that they can bring to the table knowledge from a different industry that might work wonders for your business or market.
Here are a few of the industries we’ve been fortunate to build apps and websites for:
3. Timeliness & Organization
Probably the most important aspect of your relationship with your dev team, timeliness and organization are critical for smooth sailing on any project.
You should absolutely expect your software development team to work efficiently and effectively, not moving too quick or too slow. Continuously reaching sprint milestones is a must have.
In line with this is organization. Your developers should have organizational structure in place to handle everything from incoming client requests to debugging and testing to code releases. You shouldn’t have to continue asking about the state of a current task or the project as a whole; your dev team should keep you updated and notify you of any major changes.
As a reference of what you should expect, here’s our simplified process we use with every client relationship and project we build:
- Discover the Problem — we help the client identify their main requirements and narrow in the focus of the application.
- Design a Solution — here we build the User Stories, Sitemap, Database Schema, Wireframes, and Hi-fi Layouts. The deliverable process culminates with a clickable prototype that the client can use internally or to speak with investors.
- Build the App — this this the main development phase and includes continuous communication, Agile sprints and Test Driven Development.
- Staging for Testing — here we release updates and provide QA testing to the app in bi-weekly staging releases following development sprints. The clients can use their app, test and attempt to break anything and everything.
- Release to Users — also synonymous to “getting it out in the wild,” this is the final release to production. By the time a feature makes it into the live environment, it should have been tested and reviewed numerous times.
Do you have an app idea or software product you want to launch? We’re here to help you think through it. Feel free to email me about your venture or checkout some of our recent projects.
