The life cycle of a project includes multiple steps like requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance. Covering various aspects of project creating requires various specialists. This scheme is a waterfall model, nonetheless, all these steps are in Agile methodology too.
For of outsourcing, the following Roles are important for the project:
- Business Analyst
- Project Manager
- Designer
- Developers (Frontend, Backend, Tech Lead, Architect and others)
- Devops
- Quality Assurance
Business Analyst (BA)
The role of a business analyst has become so important that no IT company can do without it. Previously, enterprises operated on a Developer-Client basis. As a result of this interaction, the client’s requirements were implemented in such a way that the program could not be сonvinient for either an ordinary user or a customer.
The Business Analyst profession is about analyzing the Client’s Business: finding weak points and thinking about how to make them strong. A business analyst analyzes the customer’s solution, finds drawbacks, understands problems, determines how to improve the efficiency. The main task is to understand the customer’s requests and formulate Functional Requirements for Developers. After communication with the customer, Business Analyst draws up a specification. He first describes the product, its purpose, target audience, working environment, various constraints, system functions, interfaces, and so on.
Tip, please, note that your business analyst should have experience in your domain and have great soft skills to build a partnership with you.
Project manager
The main responsibility of the PM is to bring the customer’s idea to implementation on time using existing resources. A Project Manager has to build a development plan, organize a team, set up a process for working on a project, provide feedback between teams and a customer, eliminate obstacles for teams, control quality and deliver a product on time.
The main value of a Project Manager for a customer is the management of the Project which includes:
– project documentation, drawing up a project plan
– timing agreement
– analysis of possible risks
– breaking down the product into components and distributing them to performers
– setting up a workflow in a team (development, testing, working with requirements)
– prioritization of tasks
– keeping the team in working order, team motivation
– solving all kinds of conflict situations within the team and in the connection between the customer and the team
– communication with the customer, management of his expectations, providing the customer with reports on the progress, presentation to the customer of ready-made solutions, demo versions and prototypes.
Tip: be sure that the Project Manager is experienced and coordinates the work of the Team at a high level using Agile methodologies.
Designer
UX (user experience) design is responsible for the function, adaptability of the product, and the emotions it evokes. The more user-friendly the interface, the easier it is for the user to get the result and take the targeted action.
UI (user interface) design includes work on the Product Interface: animations, illustrations, buttons, menus, sliders, photos, and fonts. UI designer determines the color palette and the location of objects in the interface. For example, it is convenient for User to click “Order”, that the drop-down menu is working correctly, that it is easy to fill out a form, that the text is readable from a smartphone and many more.UI designer is responsible for how the Product Interface looks and how the User interacts with its elements.
Thus, the Design has an impact on the success of a project.
Tip: have a look at the previous work of Designers before choosing a Designer.
Developers
There are several types of Developers. Mainly, they can be divided by technologies they are working with.
HTML & CSS developers make up the layout received from the designer.
Frontend developers make up layout and logic for the project. The Frontend is the entire client-side part of websites/web applications: interfaces, templates, styles, widgets, etc. Accordingly, everything that happens on the server-side is the Backend.
Backend developers are experts at working with databases and Backend business logic like working with Data and calculations.
Tech Lead and Architect determines the technological strategy for the development of a project or product and solves technically challenging problems that other engineers on the team cannot solve.
Moreover, there are developers working in special industries such as Machine Learning, Blockchain technology, and else. These fields require special knowledge and skills.
Tip: choose Developers keeping up with modern technologies so that your Project is relevant and easily maintainable in the future.
DevOps
DevOps is a person who is responsible for all the processes of the development cycle: development, testing, deploying, backuping. DevOps understands the architecture of the product, can assess security risks, is familiar with automation approaches and tools at a high level.
Quality Assurance
Software testing aims at checking the correspondence between it’s expected behavior and the real behavior of a program on a set of tests selected in a certain way.
Tip: a Tester should have minimal technical skills. For writing an acceptance test Tester should know the subject area of a specific business model well, so he can put himself or herself in the shoes of the Customer answering Developer’s questions. Nevertheless, Technical Skills are not required for manual testers.
To conclude, we recommend paying attention to tips of choosing the team. Always talk to the team you are going to work with to have an idea about it and not to choose a pig in a poke.
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