How to Structure a Development Team

In this article, we’ll cover such issues as approaches to organizing a development team’s workflow, agile and traditional teams differences, and give you some tips on organizing. Additionally, we’ll go over Stormotion’s approach to managing our development workflow.

So, if you’d like to build an in-house team of developers or you’re an IT firm yourself and need some insights from an experienced software development company — welcome. We hope our expertise would be helpful to you!

📐 Software Development Team Structure Approaches

In fact, there are 3 main approaches to arrange a development team. Let’s call them generalist, specialist, and hybrid. So, in this section, we’ll take a look at their strong and weak sides, and give you some examples of when one of them might be more suitable for you.

Generalist Structure

This approach implies building a development team of people with a highly diverse set of skills. Great results are reached thanks to the face-to-face communication and the cooperative effort of all members.

For instance, a front-end developer can also have some knowledge of back-end Java. Or a Project Manager can be familiar with UI design and help with this development part.

Basically, any company with enough time and budget can build such a team since it’s multi-purpose. Yet, making such an effort is more reasonable when it comes to complex and challenging projects. So, if you work on a simple product or small adjustments to it, we’d recommend considering something less resource-consuming.

🌊 Agile Software Development vs Traditional Development Teams

Nowadays, when companies create teams for projects, they can be either agile or follow traditional corporate values. Even though agile is considered modern and more efficient, traditional team structures still exist and some cases actually benefit from them a lot.

Both agile and traditional aren’t methodologies — they’re sets of principles and values that help to determine how to manage teams properly depending on what results one aims for.

Before we talk about the differences, we’d like to mention that there’s a term called Agile Manifesto, which is a summary of agile principles:

Traditional teams might be more suitable if you know you need developers to “blindly” perform requests so as not to create chaos or hold back the development. Yet, most modern IT companies and departments prefer agile team structure since it allows workers to bring the value of their best personal traits while still cooperating and being team members.

You surely don’t have to follow all the principles from one of the team types, it’s a great idea to take the best from each one of them.

📚 Tips on Structuring a Development Team

In this section, we’ll give you a couple of tips on how you can arrange and structure your software development teams.

# 1: Decide On The Size Of The Team 👥

The size of your software development team plays a significant role since it actually impacts most aspects of the process: development time, costs (on salaries/hiring), amount of resources (finance, time, and energy) needed for management, etc.

Normally, development teams aren’t that big. Even if they are, C-level then divides them into smaller ones. In fact, having small teams can give you a lot of benefits. According to QSM’s research, small teams:

• Don’t face (or face noticeably less) organizational and workflow issues.
• Are quite dynamic: they are easily structured and restructured.
• Are able to work more independently.
• Allow setting communication and coordinating the efforts of team members easier.

You should make sure that:

• Everybody has a voice.
• Team members respect each other.
• All issues are addressed.
• Even if you have a hierarchy, it shouldn't be oppressive but more of a coach-student relationship.

💡 Takeaways

To sum up, let’s recall what we’ve talked about in this article. First of all, there are 3 main approaches to structuring development teams: generalist, specialist, and hybrid. When it comes to defining principles and values of the workflow, it can be agile or traditional.

As for tips on structuring the development team, let’s briefly summarize them as well:

• Decide on the size of your team and don’t be afraid to split it into a few smaller ones.
• Wisely choose specialists that you’ll need for the project.
• Properly assign roles according to the software development team hierarchy.
• Feel free to move developers between teams.
• Take care of your teams’ microclimate.

If you have any questions left or maybe you’d like to know our opinion on your specific use case, we would be happy to help you!