The Best Ways to Scale Your Software Development Team

You can think of either your outsourced or in-house team for the software development that is either planned or ongoing. And such a team does not consist of only software developers. If you are a Project Manager, Business Analyst; Or part of Designers, Developers, and QAs, you are equally responsible to scale up your whole team. Scaling can be thought of as a way to expand your business capacity. In other words, to include another field in the business sphere. Now if you are thinking of hiring more resources or adding another department or two to support new tasks, that might be the wrong decision. As you know, a real-time project involves a client onsite and your offshore development team, scaling can turn out to be a sensible part of its plan. To scale the software development team in a smooth and effective way so that it does not fail, here are some best viable ways you should keep in mind:

Architectural Groundwork

You need to have proper product architecture in place to have the correct scaling of your team. It should align with the project as well as the organizational structure. You can implement a flawless agile methodology for projects, and for that planning is crucial. To make a good match of the software development team with the product architecture, you will need a software architect.

Because it is very important to get the two of them compatible enough to smoothen your scaling.

Strategy

Indeed, a plan of action is a must to accomplish any short-term or long-term goal. In addition to the planning of software architecture, your business or company needs a sight of where you are moving. Few factors you can consider like- goals you want to achieve, your timeframe, and how much you are willing to invest. You can form a 5-year protocol for your team covering your vision, goals, and milestones. It should be in such a manner that people in your team get a good grasp of its orchestration and be able to act on any changes effectively. 

Scattered Teams Management

One more crucial part of scaling your team is to determine distributed employees based on their different working location, countries and timezones. You should not overlook this, in order to have proper well-thought communication between team members. And it has become increasingly important in this post-COVID normal. Think of a situation: development centres and headquarters are distant by more than 9-hour; each office has its own regional preferences; some employees work remotely from home and few contractors only work on flexible hours and report the tasks into a specific system, etc. In such a situation, scaling your team can be hideous. You need to manage the distributed team by coming up with effective communication channels and creating a strategy that will not only be suitable for your in-house team but also for your distributed development. You also need to make some adjustments required in terms of employee working hours or some system alerts should be incorporated to respond to on-site emergencies.

Assemble your code for scaling

Before diving into scaling your team, you need to have pre-set standard coding norms. It could turn out to be a nightmare for a new developer who is joining your team to adjust to the team’s shared codebase. You should hire the right skilled developers to keep up the team's productivity. The prime focus should be always to maintain a crisp and simpler code. This is directly proportional to the smooth scaling of your team. To grip the concept well, you must focus on keeping your code consistent and particular with clear logic. You can follow a few conventions- 

Some steps and processes can be automated using CI/CD setup to make sure of the quality service and scaling.

Revving up Productivity and Quality

If you are looking out for productivity and quality with upcoming scaling, you need not just have more developers to have new features or enhancements be coded rapidly and better. It depends on the skillset and number of developers who can contribute simultaneously. Along with the synchronisation intact between them. And if ignored, it might lead to some missing bug. Also, you will be engaged in between fixing those bugs and errors, or you might come up with a workaround, which is actually not a solution being the issue still there. This pulls down your scaling effort. The correct pick of targeted tools and programming languages becomes crucial which will elevate your productivity and make inter-team communication easier. You must be in a position to extract the chances of a bottleneck that may arise and be ready to take up action to it. 

Adaptability using CI/CD

To make the best out of your dev team scaling, you need to have a proper execution of DevOps operation. You should implement the approach of Infrastructure As A Code (IaaS). Be it on-premise or cloud based infrastructure, at any point of time you will always have an option to add the latest infrastructure on top of it. You need to assimilate effective tools to create Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines. Along with the integration of containers, which is used to segregate the individual components of software from the universal IT infrastructure. This will help you to supervise the pieces of the developed application more effectively. In addition, you can integrate CI/CD tools with test-automation tools. 

Project Management and Growth

It must have crossed your mind about ways to manage your to-be-scaled development team. A few points you can keep in mind to manage:

Conclusion

Software Development Team scaling can upraise your business. But you need to be quite vigilant about it so that you can avoid any circumstances of losing productivity and grades. And concurrently, augment your team’s efficiency. To make your Team Expansion go hand-in-hand, you have to plan well in advance. You should steer clear of challenges that may arise. Be it architectural, management, or communication challenges. Keep the following points to tackle before jumping and to make a sharp turn in your team scaling into a business boom:

If you want to build your dream team, head to the Amplifyre OpenBench. You can outsource based on experience, role, and expertise. Once you find the right fit, just click on the 'Contact' button to get in touch with the software provider for further discussions!