If you plan to cooperate with a custom web application development company without any previous experience, some crucial questions may arise. Since you, as a customer, will have to pay employees of the company every working hour, it’s pretty natural that you may want to know how exactly the project is arranged, what specialists will work on it, and what their exact roles are.
To be fully involved in the development process, you must know who does what, what responsibilities a specific specialist has, and who you should ask questions about certain decisions. In this case, you’ll be able to ensure that the project is evolving according to your expectations. In today’s article, we’ll try to help you better understand the development process and the impact of each team member on the final result.
Web Development Team Structure and Roles
In the vast majority of cases, a software development company won’t risk its reputation and your money by using experimental and untested development techniques. Therefore, most probably, your software vendor will choose a well-proven software development life cycle methodology and arrange the main tasks among the specialists whose roles in the project are clearly defined and may sound familiar to you. Highly unlikely that in the list of team members who’ll work on your project, you’ll find something like “senior tech guru” or “JavaScript ninjas team lead.”
We mean that the structure of the web development team and the exact number of specialists involved may vary depending on the project’s complexity and the developer’s philosophy. However, the responsibilities of specific specialists remain pretty much the same. That’s why if you understand how the typical web development team works, you will be able to make a more informed decision about your project the next time you decide to work with a custom software developer.
Even though source code is the beating heart of a software product, work on the project begins much earlier than the actual writing of the code and doesn’t stop after the app seems to be working correctly. Every team member pays close attention to analysis, design, and testing that largely determine the overall project’s success. That’s why every significant project requires the involvement of specialists with solid expertise and diverse knowledge. For example, a web development team able to handle a software project may include the following team members:
- Business analysts;
- Project managers;
- UI/UX designers;
- Web developers;
- QA engineers.
It’s important to note that a successful project launch also requires several non-technical specialists for advertising and marketing, but we will save this topic for future articles.
Read Also: Benefits of Hiring Remote Team For Software Development Project
Now, let’s take a look at the primary roles and responsibilities characteristic for all mentioned web development team members.
Business Analyst
Business analyst starts to work on the project before everybody else. The main task for this specialist is to transform the customer’s vision of the future software product into technical specifications. To do that, the specialist has to elicit, analyze, and document product requirements. Other team members will then use this documentation during the whole project life cycle.
One of the essential aspects of project development at the requirement analysis stage is close cooperation between the customer and the analyst. The reason is that understanding the goals that the customer’s company wants to achieve and issues it plans to solve using the software product plays an important role. Customer’s expectations regarding the application must be translated into tech terms that other team members can discuss and work with. Business analysts must have enough tech background to describe how each block of a future application must work. This info will help to determine the project scope more accurately and define the approximate time frames for completing specific stages of the project.
Project Manager
A project manager’s primary responsibility is to coordinate the efforts of other team members to accomplish all tasks on time without budget overruns. To make things done, a project manager creates a plan that covers the project scope, sets goals for team members, defines milestones and deadlines, etc. It’s also vital for a project manager to maintain complete control over the project’s whole development life cycle. For that purpose, this specialist should constantly monitor task completion progress and compare this data with the initial project development plan. Constant communication with the customer and team members for quick issues solving and reporting on the current progress is essential for the project manager’s work.
Read Also: The Difference Between Project Manager and Business Analyst
UI/UX Designer
UI/UX designers’ work largely determines the course of the project’s development and its future success. First of all, it’s important to create an eye-catching design that will draw the attention of first users. To ensure that these users will stay with you, the app should also be intuitive, easy-to-use, and all functions must be easy to reach.
The UI/UX designer starts working on the project with an analysis of requirements to understand what difficulties the target audience may face and how to overcome them through design. UI/UX designers might also write user stories describing how users behave while interacting with the application. The product visuals such as color scheme, fonts, buttons, and others are also part of the UI/UX designer’s responsibility. To outline how the final version of the product will look designers create a wireframe to demonstrate a schematic placement of the UI elements. The example of a wireframe is below:
Developers
The team of developers is responsible for the project’s back-end and front-end parts. Long story short, the back-end is the part of the app responsible for interaction with a server. Everything that happens on the other side of the user interface is, roughly saying, a back-end developer’s area of responsibility. These specialists write server-side code using languages and frameworks suitable for that purpose, for example, Python, Node.js, .Net, and many others. Also, these specialists are responsible for database creation and management.
On the other hand, front-end is a term that includes everything you see on the screen while working with an application. Front-end developers are the specialists that work on the client-side of web apps using CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and numerous libraries and frameworks intended to simplify the project development process. To create the application, front-end developers follow the specifications and prototype/wireframe developed during the previous stages of the project.
Quality Assurance (QA)
Quality Assurance (QA) engineer’s main job is to minimize the number of bugs before the product launch. The QA team is mentioned last in our list of critical specialists. However, it doesn’t mean that you should think of testing only after your development team finished writing the code. In fact, the earlier you start implementing testing activities, the less will be the probability of reworks, bugs, and unexpected problems. The process of testing should begin with the stage of project requirements development. QA engineers can use the list of requirements for creating the initial testing plan. During the project life cycle, developers should send each version of the app to QA specialists to ensure that it corresponds to the technical requirements and customer’s expectations.
Bug reports generated by the QA team members should be sent to the development team to improve the application. The following checkback should help QA specialists to ensure that developers solved the problem correctly.
Conclusions
If you deal with a reliable software vendor, you can be sure that the process of developing a web application will be well established, and the roles of all involved specialists will be clearly defined. Understanding all stakeholders’ responsibilities will help you, as a customer, to get complete control over the project development process and make sure your requirements are met in the best possible way.
Want to embody your idea into a real application and look for a professional team for its development? Contact us, and we will help you to gather a dream team that would implement its talent and knowledge to create an ideal product.