Software Development Team: Top 3 Critical Success Factors

Critical Success Factors for a Software Development Team

In today’s blog, Trustify’s technology team shares how we achieved effective software development team goals based on insights from one of our long-term projects. If you need more comprehensive backup solutions to support your development goals, contact us to find out which services from Trustify’s Technology Outsourcing team can help you get your project right.

At Trustify Technology, the goals of our software development team are usually based on the what we undertake in the project’s Service Level Agreement (SLA), which includes three key goals:

  • Meet the project’s requirements.
  • Deliver on time.
  • Maintain high quality.

We’ll show you how to achieve these goals in a sustainable and efficient way. To do this, we’ll take a fintech company’s software outsourcing project as an example. The project lasted for several years and involved continuous software development based on the Scrum methodology.

If you haven’t got a team for your project already, we recommend getting started with our article on building effective teams and creating a productive work environment.

Critical Success Factors for a Software Development Team

#1. Meet the project’s requirements

To achieve this goal, well-defined project specifications must be created, but change requests remain flexible throughout the project. Here are some particularly helpful tips from our projects:

  • Ensure that all parties involved have a common understanding of the software. In the early stages of the project, our business analysts held on-site workshops with client’s stakeholders and our team to finalize key software requirements, architecture, and design, and ensure that everyone was moving in the same direction
  • Ensure a robust change management process. To manage change requests quickly and avoid impacting existing functionality, all change requests are presented in a business proposal format and added to the project plan. These proposals include objectives, project impact, effort, and time estimates. After the changes are implemented, customer stakeholders perform user acceptance testing for final approval.

Goal #2. Deliver project on time

Trustify Technology’s experience reveals that the key to successfully meeting deadlines, especially for long-term iterative projects like the one mentioned in the beginning of this blog, is two-fold:

  • Process automation. The team automated the entire delivery pipeline following a DevOps approach to accelerate development and ensure smooth adoption of future functionality.
  • Continuous monitoring of progress. To stay focused and plan daily efforts more effectively, our team leveraged burndown charts to show how close they were to completing the sprint’s scope of work. And to plan appropriate workloads for future iterations, we analyzed the team’s velocity graph, which shows the average amount of work per Iterations. These diagrams become more reliable as the project progresses, for example after 5 or more iterations.

Need help in achieving team goals?

​​Trustify technology can analyze your development process, identify and remove any bottlenecks, and create a detailed plan for the sustainable growth of your team’s efficiency.

#3. Maintain high quality

No matter how tight the schedule, avoid rushing software development at the cost of quality. Or else, there is a risk that the focus will shift from development to the struggle against growing technical debt. We recommend that you think about quality at the beginning of a project when establishing the process. For example, our project quality assurance includes the following pillars:

  • An agile culture was adopted in the team. Our software development team followed agile principles that help deliver quality software in a fast-moving market: focus on speed without compromising quality, understand the business aspect, share responsibility and communicate frequently.
  • Code quality evaluation. By running automated reviews, the team measured critical code quality metrics to prevent unnecessary complexity and maintain software efficiency during ongoing development.
  • Continuous testing. As part of a DevOps approach, the team implemented continuous testing to identify errors and bugs early for fixing before production.

Final Notes

We recommend that project managers work with the team to devise a plan to achieve the goals as this helps them gain valuable insights from different perspectives.

However, it is sometimes difficult to achieve goals due to a lack of specialized knowledge or urgent deadlines. Overloading the team to meet challenging goals will likely have the opposite effect. If you have already encountered this, consider outsourcing part of the project as an efficient and cost-effective solution to solve resource shortages and deliver software on time as scheduled. Our software development team will be happy to help, just let us know.