Key Roles in Software Development Teams

For the successful development of a project, careful planning, a talented team and collaboration of team members is necessary. With the key team members in place, a project moves forward.

Let’s understand 6 key professional roles in quality software development.

1. Business analyst

After the sales have taken place, business analysts get involved in the project development. The basic task of a business analyst is to communicate between clients and the expert development team. The client and team have different perspectives. As clients want to achieve goals and programmers, focus on how to achieve a client’s goals through features and code lines. Business analyst collects client’s requirements for the desired product and exactly defines needs and wants of clients. BA conducts a competitor’s research and checks a client’s product competitiveness with already existing products.

Role of BA

• Create wireframes

• Create user personas

• Defines the target audience

• Write a software requirements specification

• Optimal development process

• Interpreting the client’s requirements

• Preparing documentation

• Maintaining effective communication between the clients and the team.

2. Project manager

After gathering the client’s requirement and thorough interpretation, the project manager comes into the game. The basic task is to manage the project of the development team.

The basic task of project manager-

• Like BA, a project manager can also involve in communication with clients

• Distributing task among software engineers

• Plans the workflow

• Motivates the team

• Control the process

• Coordinates the activities of the team

• Time management

• Managing risks and unpredicted situations

• Make sure the development goes according to the plan

Duties of project manager-

• Develop a project plan

• Recruit staff according to project

• Manage deliverables as per plan

• Manage and lead the project team

• Regular updates to upper management

• Strategic input

3. UI/UX designer

The major part of the project creativity comes from the UX/UI designer. Their task is to make a product look good, convenient, and pleasant to use. They use wireframes created by the business analysts and clients and draw mockups and create app interface design according to the trends and guidelines.

UX designer plans the app flow and makes the product easy to use.

Role of UI/UX designer-

• Focusing on the user and there needs

• Create dynamic prototypes

• Represent how a real product will behave

• Permits to test a prototype on the real device prior to development.

• This helps clients and programmers to see the model and write the code

• Provides graphic elements for application stores, mockup, and logo of the product.

• A UI designer brings life to a product

4. Developers and programmers

Well, we all know they are the core of the team with a distinct experience. Programmers understand what the client wants and then translates the human language and language of graphics into the digital technology language for computers and technical devices.

Different levels of software engineers are- junior, middle and senior developers depending on the level of expertise and working experience. Every developer has different fields of expertise, language, and platforms where they work. Thus, on one project, there are a variety of software developers working.

For eg, if we take a mobile application development project then we need an android developer, an iOS developer, and a backend developer.

Duties of developers and programmers

• Managing, researching, designing and implementing programs

• New programs evaluation and t

  esting

• Implementing and writing efficient code

• Maintaining the existing system and upgrading

• Quality assurance procedure development

• Working closely with other developers and maintaining communication

5. QA (Quality Analyst)

To secure a high-quality product a quality assurance specialist is very important. They completely examine the whole app flow and define bugs and flaws and report to the development team about bug fixing. Before completing a product and exposing it to the real users it is important to detect errors. This helps in providing a good user experience to the user and saves the face of the product.

Responsibilities of QA

• Troubleshoot and investigate defects

• Develop and implement test plans

• Offer excellent testing service in a professional manner

• Drafting quality assurance policies and procedures

• Inform about the defects found in the standard defect tracking tool

• Implement and monitor test scripts to check reliability and functionality

• Compiling and analyzing statistical data

• Within the production process identify bugs and provide a remedy for defects

• Investigate customer complaints and product issues

• Offer test summary which reflects quality attributes of software under testing

• Suggest a solution and diagnose problems.

6. Marketing specialist

These specialists deal with the product post-development stage. They play an important role in almost every product. Marketing is an important tool because if the team develops a product, but if it is not marketed, there is no use of it.

Duties of marketing specialist

• They conduct market research on the first stage of development.

• Prepare launch marketing campaigns.

• Search distribution channels

• Social media marketing

• SEO writing

• Product description(content marketing)

• Perform application statistics analysis

• Determining new features to implement

• Measuring user reaction and demand

• Checking critics

• Finding a solution for problems and customer satisfaction

Wrapping up- “all it takes as a team”

In the process of software development, what is more, important is to have a team “a team of dedicated specialists and experts”. Software development is all about bringing a team of professionals together and achieve common goals. Bring the new products to life by constant collaboration, creativity, and working as a team. Being in the IT industry, it is equally important to work efficiently and look at digital transformation. With the right people in place and a variety of roles, an organization can deliver desirable products to clients and can achieve the best results.