You have a product to build and a rough idea of the budget, but you are not sure who you actually need to hire. One senior developer? Five? A designer and a tester too?
A software development team is the group of specialists who plan, build, test, ship, and maintain a software product. It pairs the people who write the code with the people who guide and protect the work: product owners, project managers, designers, QA engineers, and DevOps. So how many of these roles does your project really need, and how should the team be put together?
A software development team is a group of specialists who turn an idea into working software and keep it running. A typical team includes engineers who build the product, a product owner who sets priorities, a project manager or Scrum Master who organizes the work, designers, QA engineers, and DevOps. Most teams run with ten or fewer people.
One person rarely covers all of that. Modern software touches several areas at once: an interface users tap through, a server that handles their requests, data that has to stay safe, and automated checks that catch bugs before release. Each area needs someone who knows it well.
That is why even a small product usually needs a handful of people, since a single “do-it-all” developer rarely covers everything. The team members share ownership of the product and cover for each other’s blind spots. A developer focused on how a feature should work will not always spot how a user might break it. A QA engineer will. The exact mix changes from project to project, and a good team is sized to the work it faces.
There are many debates about software development team skill sets on the web. It’s no wonder that you can have a little doubt about whom you should hire first: a specialist, a generalist, or both?
What matters in reality is not the breadth or depth of a particular professional’s skills, but their adaptability and open-mindedness. Suppose a person has no problem with learning and self-development – and a true professional does not – in that case they will be able to switch from generalist to specialist role on-demand with relative ease.
Another important criterion is soft skills. According to Forbes, soft skills are becoming more and more important, regardless of the industry, and this trend will only continue to increase in the future.
One more important thing – Agile Manifesto states that individuals and interactions stand above processes and tools. What does this mean? Sometimes it is better to have someone in the team who writes plain working code on the team than someone who writes super-efficient yet obscure code, thus causing data siloing and miscommunication.
Of course, a client is looking for a full skill set within a single software development team. The learning time is simply not part of their project. So which type of team to pick? Let’s take a closer look.
Generalist team members have an understanding of how the product works as a whole and how to improve it, if needed
Lacking both experience and theoretical knowledge, generalists sometimes fail to use a particular technology most efficiently
Good at multitasking, learning new technologies, and adaptation
Compared head to head against a specialist, take more time to finish a task
Focus on communication and work across silos
Rely on “executive presence” in decision-making
Generalist team members understand how the whole product fits together and move easily between tasks. They are quick to learn new tools and they keep communication flowing across the team. The trade-off is depth: a generalist takes longer on a specialized task than an expert would, and may not use a given technology in the most efficient way.
Becoming a generalist is merely a natural point in every developer’s career, should they choose to become Team Leads or Project Managers, master a new tool or a related technology. It is not unheard of that PMs write code, fix bugs, and fill the gaps in product documentation in their available.
It is also not unheard of that developers write and run tests for their own software or deliver turnkey solutions single-handedly, from product design and interface to business logic and basic analytics. These professionals pretty much fall into the definition of a generalist.
Look for a generalist team if you need a simple, single-purpose product. In some cases, this team can even consist of one person.
Each specialist has profound knowledge of their domain
Face the risk of data siloing and miscommunication
Specialist team can finish fairly complex projects faster
May need more time to fit the separate project components together
Master the project details
Rely on good project management
Each specialist has deep knowledge of one area, so a specialist team finishes complex projects faster and handles the hard details well. The risk is coordination: specialists can end up siloed, need extra time to fit their components together, and depend on good project management to stay aligned.
When it comes to complex scalable solutions, a generalist team will just lack the required knowledge to cope with their implementation. For example, a product owner has an idea to develop a healthcare-related website that must be equally convenient to access from all mainstream platforms, feature custom corporate website design, and analyze visitor data.
It takes the following web development team roles: Front-end, Backend, UI/UX Design, and Data Analyst. Besides, the website must be multilingual, so someone must take over professional copywriting and translations (ideally, with proper SEO).
For a generalist team, finishing the project would take much more time and result in overall lower quality of the product.
Offer a healthy balance of specialization and cross-technology knowledge
Assembling a perfect hybrid team might turn out expensive and time-consuming
Potentially the best composition that leads to maximum efficiency
Require precise distribution of responsibilities
The obvious conclusion of this section is to rely on the stakeholders’ vision of the project and their needs when it comes to choosing a team type. Each project is unique, so the number of parameters to take into consideration is considerable. Both specialist-only and generalist-only teams have weaknesses that make them unsuitable in certain scenarios. The hybrid team is the best of two worlds.
In fact, the default scrum team structure assumes the existence of both specialists and generalists by default: a PM or a Team Lead is the software development team’s chief generalist, while each development team department is dedicated to their specific task.
A software development project management expert ties all the team together and removes all the miscommunication issues. You will see them literally run back and forth between departments all day, doing their job and delivering the holistic image of the project to the client.
That also brings us to the discussion of the difference between traditional and agile teams.
First thing to say is that agile and traditional teams rely on fundamentally different approaches. Let’s look at the most distinctive disparities between the two:
Organizational structure
Iterative, Continuous Integration/Delivery
Linear, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)Iterative, Continuous Integration/Delivery
User requirements
Interactive input
Clearly defined before implementationInteractive input
Involvement of clients
Throughout a project development
Only the early stages of a project
Documentation
Less important than the project’s constant evolution thus rather unreliable
Written once, maximally detailed and unambiguous
Time estimation
Extremely approximated, done by the team, short-term planning
Maximally precise, done by the PM, long-term planning
Get inspired by our article “Custom software development costs: how to estimate your budget”
The traditional waterfall model was documented in 1970, twenty years before the appearance of Scrum, Agile Manifesto, in turn, appeared in 2001, more than 10 years after Scrum showed up.
Hence, it is important to mention that Scrum should not be confused with Agile. One can still follow Agile methodology without Scrum boards, sprints, and daily meet-ups.
The waterfall model was being abandoned because following it in software development proved inappropriate.
A fairly complex solution takes half a year and more to develop. Client requirements, user expectations, and the market situation in a given niche are guaranteed to change during that period. Agile approach is designed to satisfy the need for change whenever it arises instead of avoiding it and moving on.
Some may find the way agile software development teams estimate task effort lighthearted: who would associate task effort with T-shirt or dog sizes? Nonetheless, it is the way to reflect the fact that effort and time are impossible to predict beforehand more precisely.
These facts shouldn’t give the impression that the traditional approach is hopelessly outdated and inefficient. Choose it if:
A full software development team brings together people who build the product and people who guide it. Here is who does what on a typical team:
Product owner
Represents the client and sets product priorities
Project manager / Scrum Master
Organizes the work and removes blockers
Business analyst
Turns business needs into clear requirements
Software architect / tech lead
Defines the technical structure and standards
UI/UX designer
Designs how the product looks and feels to use
Front-end developer
Builds the part users see and interact with
Back-end developer
Builds the server side and business logic
Full-stack developer
Works across both front end and back end
QA engineer
Checks the product and catches bugs before release
QA automation engineer
Writes automated tests to speed up checking
DevOps engineer
Keeps the product deployable, secure, and running
Tech writer
Documents the product for users and developers
Every team needs someone who owns the product vision and someone who keeps the work moving. The product owner represents the client side and decides what gets built and in what order. The project manager, or the Scrum Master in a Scrum team, makes sure the developers have what they need and that the work matches the product owner’s expectations.
The way these roles fit together depends on the methodology. Scrum teams aim to keep the work transparent and open to change, inspecting and adapting as they go. They run on a lean set of roles, with a product owner and a Scrum Master supporting the developers, and add others as the work needs them.
A traditional, waterfall-style project adds a layer of governance above the delivery team. A business owner makes the big decisions and, with a chief information officer, appoints a project sponsor who answers for the project’s direction.
A steering committee of stakeholders reviews progress at each stage, and a security officer watches over the system from design through to maintenance. The project manager sits at the center, balancing the plan, the budget, the team, and the schedule, and reporting up the chain. Agile teams fold most of these duties into fewer roles and treat every member as a contributor with a real say.
Here is a brief overview of traditional software development team roles and responsibilities:
The roles so far make up most software development teams. A few newer ones are becoming standard as products lean more on data and AI, and they are worth planning for now.
The modern software development team roles to know include:
AI and machine learning engineers build the features that learn from data, such as recommendations, search rankings, fraud checks, or a chat assistant. They frame the problem, prepare the data, train and tune the models, and check the results until the output is reliable. They rarely work alone, leaning on data engineers for clean inputs and on the people who deploy and monitor models in production. Most teams add one only once an AI feature moves from idea to roadmap.
Prompt engineers design and refine the instructions that get reliable, consistent output from large language models. They work out how wording, examples, structure, and context change a model’s answers, then turn what works into reusable templates with guardrails for when users push a feature in odd directions. The role sits close to AI/ML and product work, and it matters most when an AI feature is user-facing and its answers must remain accurate.
Data engineers build the pipelines that collect, clean, store, and move data so the rest of the team can use it. Without them, analysts and AI features work from messy or missing inputs, and the results show it. A product that relies on analytics or machine learning needs a data engineer early on, while a simpler product can wait until data volume grows.
Security and platform engineers protect the product and build the internal tools the rest of the team relies on. The security side covers access controls, data protection, compliance, and the response when something goes wrong. The platform side packages common services into clear tools and standards so developers ship faster and more safely.
Most software development teams work best with 10 or fewer people. The Scrum Guide puts it simply: a team should be “small enough to remain nimble and large enough to complete significant work,” which it sets at typically 10 or fewer. Smaller teams communicate better and lose less time to coordination.
In practice, a common setup is 4 to 9 builders, with a product owner and a project manager guiding them and QA checking the work. A minimal build can be far smaller. A simple web product can start with a designer who doubles as a researcher and one or two developers. As the product grows, you add specialists and, eventually, a second team.
So far, we can safely conclude that:
Installable PC software is also referred to as “standalone.” It works on Linux, Mac, or Windows, serving a single user as a rule. A suite of office programs is an example of such software.
Modern infotainment system software that is used, for example, in self-driving cars is also considered and developed as standalone. This domain of development is not going to die out anytime soon.
A minimal build software development team could include:
Modern infotainment systems, like those in self-driving cars, also count as standalone software, so the category is far from fading. The languages lean toward C#, C/C++, Python, and the occasional niche option.
Web apps serve many users at once and run anywhere there is a browser, which is why so many products start here.
Two members are enough for the minimal build:
Either of the two can share the role of a PM. Simple!
A serious project would involve more people and more roles so that a product could be deployed faster, error-free, and ready for scaling and extension with third-party applications.
To reach users on phones, the team adds a mobile app group, and a chatbot developer can cover basic support without a full support team. The usual front-end stack is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a framework like React, with Node.js or Python on the back end.
Embedded software development engineers work closer to hardware than any other team on the list. The hardware in question has unique restrictions due to its miniature size. Environment sensors, visual recognition, autonomous vehicles, everything that belongs to the Internet-of-Things – these domains are their bread and butter. Look for such teams if you’re setting up a smart house. Or a military base!
Embedded software engineering team roles most often exclude Designers or Frontenders. The software made by embedded engineers is meant to communicate with particular hardware and other machines, not humans.
Thus, a single embedded developer is a software development team of its own.
As a products’ complexity rises, more developers will collaborate on it under the guidance of an experienced Architect and other typical agile team members. A QA team and a Business Analyst will be required as well.
Any mainstream IDE fits their purpose. If the solution is relatively simple, any text editor will suffice. To test their code, embedded developers run appropriate emulators and debuggers. For the most part, the code is written in pure C or C++, in conjunction withscripting languages like Python.
Mobile development centers on the developers and QA, organized to fit the chosen methodology.
Each of the two mobile device operating systems (iOS and Android) has its own native programming language. iOS native apps are written in Swift. Android apps are typically written in Java or Kotlin.
It is technically possible to develop both Android and iOS apps on, say, React Native or Flutter, as a part of cross-platform mobile development.
A mobile device display parameters and unique hardware architecture make it difficult for developers who previously specialized on desktop development to carry their skills over. That said, a great mobile app development team cannot consist predominantly of generalists, although a BA would be, without a doubt, incredibly helpful in particular cases.
A sufficiently complex product would require all the roles in software development we have listed.
For the sake of example, think about something extremely common: a food catering business.
It is impossible to imagine any business without a website. In our particular case, a website will:
Website backend developers will set up user accounts and the ordering workflow. Frontend developers can make sure that the website is perfectly usable from any device. So does this company need both a website and an app? Yes, it does. To put it succinctly, an app would help the company stay closer to its users.
There’s a good reason to install self-service kiosks at stores as soon as possible. The programming for these is carried out by Full-Stack engineers or by Embedded developers in conjunction with Frontenders. The technologies used in the development are going to be entirely different from those used in web development.
Quality Assurance is indispensable in such projects: they will detect problems before the whole project is staged for release.
Finally, it takes a Data Analyst to process all the data aggregated from the website, the app, and the terminals, and turn it into a set of potentially beneficial business decisions to better serve their audience by improving the products and optimizing sales. A Business Analyst or a Subject Matter Expert will look for potential markets and research the niche.
Depending on the chosen approach and goals, the other roles can be involved.
Check out our article “Top Big Data Technologies: How They Can Benefit Your Business”
Once you know the team you need, the question is how to get it. You have three broad options, and the right one depends on how fast you need to move and how long you need the team.
Building in-house is the traditional route: hire a strong senior developer first, then grow the team one person at a time. It gives you the most control and the tightest culture fit, but it is slow, and a growing company rarely has months to spare or a recruiting team to speed things up.
Hiring a dedicated team or augmenting your existing one is the faster route. Instead of recruiting each person yourself, you bring in vetted developers who are ready to start. A staff augmentation partner like DOIT sends the first pre-screened mid and senior-level profiles within three to five business days for common stacks and handles sourcing, contracts, payroll, and onboarding so your own team stays focused on the build.
Which route fits depends on your timeline and how permanent the need is. A long-term core team may be worth building in-house. A specialist you need for one project, or extra capacity for a deadline, is usually faster and cheaper to bring in.
To help you decide which software development team to hire, the in-house or the remote one, let us narrow down the choice of countries with the best software developers in the world.
These rankings are not absolute. Statistical data tends to be inaccurate and biased. The criteria taken into consideration widely vary across researchers, so we have reviewed them and come up with the following list of the top 4 best countries to hire a software development team from:
Unless a client wants to follow a scientific guideline on performance evaluation of software development teams, there are a few simple steps to determine their fitness.
Hopefully, this article will be a valuable guide if you’re having a hard time hiring your first software development team. Now you know some basic terminology, software development team structure types, software development team processes, methodologies, and technologies depending on the platform focus.
If you would rather not spend months recruiting software developers, DOIT can help you put the team together. DOIT places vetted middle and senior developers and full teams on flexible terms, and handles sourcing, vetting, contracts, and payroll so your team can focus on shipping. If you want to build a software development team from scratch or are looking for a way to extend an existing one – get in touch!
Transform your idea into a successful product with top developers from DOIT.
Contact usSoftware development team members are all specialists involved in the development process. Product Owner contributes to planning, financing, and product evaluation; Project manager ensures the communication between the dev team and the client side. The software developer team that works on the product may include Frontend, Backend, QA engineers, DevOps, Tech Writing, BA, and other specialists.
Building a software development team may start when a product owner has decided on a development approach (agile or traditional) and the final product’s look and purpose. A detailed, unambiguous product description is obligatory in the case of SDLC application. The team composition will depend on the end product’s desired functionality, budget, and time restrictions.
Management usually sits with the project manager or, in a Scrum team, the Scrum Master. Their job is to keep the work visible, remove blockers, protect the team’s focus, and keep everyone moving, while the product owner decides what gets built first. The methodology sets the rhythm: agile teams plan in short cycles and adjust often, while traditional teams plan further ahead. Good management means giving the team what it needs to deliver.
It is best to have 5 to 9 people within agile software development teams. Product Owner, Project Manager, and Lead Developer are obligatory, and other roles depend on the project’s target platform.
The Project manager is the key figure in traditional software development teams. The impact of clients is limited to the starting phases of a product’s life cycle. As for the agile teams, there really is no central figure because every team member can suggest changes to a product and shares its ownership with other members.
