When you’re working on creating a development team you want to be sure that you aren’t getting too big but also that you aren’t too small. After all, you want to have a good variety of people and opinions so you can hear about new ideas and most definitely try them out. But having too many means that it’s harder to make decisions. So, just how many people should you actually have for a development team?
Understanding the Total Team
Your overall team for any type of development should be approximately three to nine people. That may not seem like a very large team, and you may be tempted to add in a larger group, but it is actually important that you don’t get too overwhelmed with the numbers. A larger team can slow you down, but make sure you’re not getting so small that everyone agrees about everything.
Slightly larger groups (in the five to nine range) will give you more opinions and varied experiences that can help you come up with better ideas. If you get too small you could end up with a lot of followers who just agree with what others have to say and that means you won’t get anything truly unique. But keep in mind each of these individuals has a different role to fill as well.
Scrum Master
The scrum master or the leader of the team is responsible for getting things done within the team. They’re supposed to make sure that everyone is contributing and also ensure that the goals of the team are being achieved. They will keep people on task, follow work agreements, and make sure that everyone is meeting the overall values of the team or business.
This individual is often the one coaching at the meeting to get people to open up and encourage conversation. They also advocate for policy and principles, they put the team ahead of the rest, and they ensure the team doesn’t get distracted along the way.
Front-End
Your front-end team is the people that are responsible for creating the part of your product or service that your customers can see on the website. They create all of the stylistic aspects and much of what’s going to keep your customers coming back. You want them to be on your team because they’re going to have insight into just how these aspects of coding and development need to function.
If you have front-end team members helping with the project you can rest assured that they understand the overall design components of how your ideas are going to work. They provide a valuable resource when making final decisions because they can stay up to date on what’s happening in real-time and ensure that they are capable of fulfilling the responsibilities that are being put on them.
Back-End
Your back-end team is the ones that are responsible for a lot of the things that your customers (and you) don’t see. But they are extremely important to getting things done and making sure that your website is up and running when you and your customers want it to be. They create a lot of the hidden things about your coding and that means they are essential to keeping your company up and running.
By having these individuals on the team you’re ensuring that they know what’s going on and can provide input on what can and can’t be done. They can also help you understand where trouble or potential time lags could come in because they can weigh in immediately on what’s being discussed and what that is going to entail for their portion of the project.
Keep it Balanced
You don’t want to have a full scrum team that is made up only of front-end or only of back-end developers. While it may seem like a good idea to put these individuals together and let them come up with ideas, it can actually backfire on the company as you’re trying to implement changes and start making a different decisions for the future of your team.
When you put all front-end developers or all back-end developers together chances are they are going to focus on their own portion of the end product. This is to be expected, but it means that they don’t truly recognize or understand the ways in which their decisions or suggestions could influence those on the opposite team.
Front-end developers or back-end developers may have only a cursory understanding of just what their counterparts do and this means they may assume that things can be done that actually can’t or that a specific task will be simple when in fact it would be very complex. By putting these individuals in teams together, these issues can be discovered before the plans get too far along.
What You Need to Do
When you’re building your development team you need one person who is going to be the leader and make sure that everything stays on task. You then want to make sure that you have at least one person responsible for the front end and one responsible for the back end. If your team has this split then you’ll at least get a good amount of discussion in and good representation.
If you have a larger company you may want a slightly larger team (remember, no more than nine people) that will give you more specific representation for those who are in different areas of front-end or back-end development.
Conclusion
No matter how you choose to get things done, the most important part is to make sure that your team is able to work together. If they are, then you’re going to find yourself on a path toward success and you’re definitely going to be happy with the end products that your team puts together. If your team is not working well together you need to get together with your project leader and find out what can be done.
Upstack gives you the ability to search the perfect software dev for your project by skill, location, experience level and more. Contact us!
Originally published at Upstack.co on Dec 9, 2021, by Samantha Dewitt.
