Why is hiring the right dev team a key part in determining your success?
Hiring is never easy. And with the ever-modernizing demands of software and product development, getting the right software development team has never been more important.
Assembling the right dev team is one of the key factors that determine the future and success of your project or business. It means more than having employees that will collaborate and develop your project. In choosing the right team members, you are choosing the business partners who will bring your vision to life.
And it is important – in order for your company to achieve its planned mission and reach its desired goals and objectives.
Now, when hiring, you obviously want the best for your tech team. The most qualified and competent developers, who are also the smartest and most creative people. And it’s alright to aspire for a great team of developers for your business. But it’s a bit tricky to hire a perfect dev team remotely just based on their CVs and a few Zoom interviews.
It turns out that technical skills and experience will only get you so far. You need to know about some critical behavioral characteristics and mindsets that highly successful software developers cultivate to set them apart from the crowd.
Remember, software development and collaboration can last from a few months to several years, so it is crucial that the team you build is the right fit for both the project and your business.
It can be challenging to build or hire great development teams. However, the majority of the best teams share certain characteristics. Here are 7 qualities that can shed light on the ability of a candidate to become part of a great software development team.
List of 7 criteria that a dev team should meet
- Writing clean code
The first good habit practiced by highly successful developers.
A developer needs to make sure their code is human readable, easy to maintain, update or scale whenever necessary. With technology changing very rapidly it’s almost certain that there may be instances where someone else will eventually need to read and modify or improve the code. So the developer must focus on factors such as –
- Smaller and pleasant to read code
- Can be easily extended by any other developer
- Has minimal dependencies with other elements
- Isn’t redundant
- Testing and prototyping
An increasingly crucial characteristic of high-quality software development.
During the software development process, prototyping is the ideal way to test, evaluate, and validate your idea to confirm that you are building the right product before the dev team actually codes it. In other words, it reduces project risk. It helps to reduce development cost, improves user experience, improves collaboration in team members and identifies and fixes flaws at an early stage.
So a good dev team should have the plan and tendency to go for these sorts of testing before diving into coding.
- Have a clear vision and goal
At ITConquest, we understand successful product development requires staff augmentation and an agile team to manage the complexities of providing a series of features at the right costs, using the most appropriate technologies.
And a dev team must have a roadmap that is visual, clear and accessible for anyone to answer the following questions:
What is the team working on? Why is the team working on it? How does this tie back to the product vision and goal ?
Having a roadmap with clear vision and goal is important because –
- It aligns everyone around your vision and strategy
- Facilitates discussion with team members and provides an opportunity for valuable feedback from Product Owners, Stakeholders, UX Designers, Developers and Testers.
- Communicates the progress and status of product development.
- Motivates the team
- Gives the team a clear direction to follow and what they should focus on.
- Schedule and plan out each task
A developer needs to be disciplined.
“A highly skilled software engineer without discipline is like a veteran sailor without a map: really good at steering the boat, but can’t find shore.” says Gady Pitaru, CTO at Badger Maps.
Highly successful developers embrace processes because they recognize they’ve been put in place to help devs succeed. They are fully present during code reviews and encourage constructive sprint retros.They plan and estimate the duration of each task and proceed accordingly to make the best use of their time and resources.
- Continual learning- courses, internal and external workshops etc.
To stay relevant, a software developer needs to continually build on their skills and stay up-to-date with new technologies and platforms. They need to go beyond skill to achieve expertise and be open to new things. And highly successful software developers are constantly learning about new trends in the industry and applying them directly to their work.
There’s a constant stream of new languages, frameworks, and methodologies that successful software engineers learn to help themselves continue to do their best and grow. So, arguably the most important skill for a successful software engineer is knowing how to acquire new skills.
- Use tools and utilities (3rd party add-ins)
As the digital world evolves, so too has the role of a developer. Modern developers are jacks and jills of all trades, expected to know their way around coding, UI and UX design, prototyping, wire-framing, SEO and much, much more.
This means it’s a lot of work and to have the expertise in using necessary 3rd party add-ins and right tools. DevOps has accelerated the dependency of IT shops on third-party software components as Agile development teams seek ways to efficiently develop software. A dev team should have the skills and resources to suffice that.
- Have the end product in mind at all times
Last, but definitely not least, a successful dev team begins with the end in mind.
A dev team with this mindset always-
- Has prioritization key traits
- Has a strategic plan and proactive approach
- Checks if they can get software into production safely and reliably
- Considers deployment frequency (culture), and if the right tools and platforms are in place (technology).
Taking the time to make the right hires and carefully thinking through your recruiting strategy is one of the best investments your business will ever make.
You need to make sure every developer you hire understands your business challenges and how things can be improved is critical. So watchout for these criterias in your dev team to know you’re going for the right coders.
If you are looking to expand your software development team, contact us to discuss your project and find the best match among our developers.
