The Skills and Jobs that were selected for the team encompassing ‘four essential programming experts’ were, a Front-End developer, a Back-End developer, a Tech Lead and finally a DevOps Engineer. After a thorough assessment of the limitations regarding the number of members allocated to this team, it was decided that it would be close to impossible to develop and implement a native approach to the ‘Budget Hub’ application. Therefore, the roles that were selected would fit the development of a web application.
A Front-End developer and a Back-End developer were selected as they could work together to ensure that the client-side technologies would be developed in a way that makes it a user-friendly web application using the latest UI/UX technologies and frameworks. The Back-End developer would oversee the server-side technologies and ensure that they develop a functioning project. The importance of a Back-End developer can be highlighted by this quote from Nora Kramer Designs (2021) “without solid backend support, a great-looking frontend can easily fail. No matter how enticing a webpage looks at first glance, visitors will eventually turn away if the functions are compromised.” This quote by Nora Kramer Designs is one that breathes wisdom, enlightening us to the vitality of a reliable and completely functional back-end. Adding to this, Thomas Watson a former chairman and CEO of IBM once said, “Great design will not sell an inferior product, but it will enable a great product to achieve its maximum potential” (Pandey 2018), indicating that front end development is equally important in any project. The Back-End and Front-End developers will be working alongside to ensure that the project idea is being developed in a cohesive fashion following an agreed-upon detailed outline and work breakdown structure.
The conductor of the meetings who will oversee the entire project shall be the Tech Lead. The Tech Lead is essential to the team, one who sets realistic goals in conjunction with creating calculated timelines and risk analysis during the project development. The Tech Lead would be required to possess excellent communication skills, ensuring that all the developers and DevOps on the team are able to succeed in their goals of completing a finished product within an estimated timeframe. Through the use of project management tools and methodologies, the Tech Lead will establish that the team acquires the relevant and contemporary methods to help the team stay on track. The Tech Lead also needs to be assertive when members get off track and can motivate team members to make certain that deadlines are met. Being part of such a small team, we realized that the Tech Lead would also need to perform coding tasks. On occasion, Tech Leads may execute prototyping of the developing project to enable team members visualize the exact needs of the project. The Tech Lead would also need to advise the Back-End and Front-End developers with technical skills as well as testing and syntactical edits.
The DevOps engineer is another position that we decided would be useful to have in this close-knit team. And “Rather than specialize in a single scripting language”, they should “be familiar with multiple languages, such as Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Bash and others” (Applause, 2021). The DevOps engineer will also be required to have networking technical skills, and substantial back-end knowledge as it would be unrealistic and would heavily compromise functionality and/or quality of the application if all back-end tasks were allocated to a single developer.
Whilst conducting thorough research, the members struggled with the limited number of roles supplied. They weighed the potential of acquiring a Business Analyst (BA) for the team and had a discussion on what type of role could fulfill a BA’s typical tasks. For example, it is widely accepted that a Business Analyst is essential to the commencement and conclusion of an application development process, as the client will not possess the skill or experience required to translate technical requirements to the team. For our team, we decided that the Team Lead could partially fulfill this role.
A divergence of ideas occurred when a team member mentioned that they... “[Felt] like we need a QA”. This was then followed by a considerably resourceful response by another team member mentioning that “It could be project lead to double up as QA”. While it may be possible for the Team Lead to fulfill this requirement, alternate solutions may apply, one being the developers may conduct their own QA (quality assurance). The answer to this matter is somewhat subjective and will boil down to the skills and competencies of the members hired.
The four roles which have been thoroughly assessed and mentioned as above have been concluded as not only essential to the furthering of the Budget Hub application but are assessed to be completely capable of meeting both time and functional requirements.