Developers are like the formworkers and bricklayers of the digital landscape. Their work powers software and digital platforms from the ground up. So their role is highly specialised, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that if they have the technical skills, they’ll automatically make a good team member.
Whether you’re developing a new app that needs to launch soon, or you’ve been tasked with revamping an older website, you’ll need a top-notch team that will get the job done well, and this means investing in skilled team players.
So what are the specific skills you should be looking for when building a devs team? In this article, we list helpful soft and hard skills for each hire to ensure you’re equipped with a competent crew.
Familiarity With Universally Used Digital Files
There are countless specialist software involved in digital development work. While your team needs coding skills, they don’t need to know specific platforms yet—that can easily be trained. However, they should have familiarity with universally used digital files, as these will be used daily.
As PDFs are universally accessible file types, proficiency in using and designing them is an obvious requirement for development teams. A dev team member needs to be able to merge PDF files, edit documents and send key information as accessible file formats to their team members or clients.
They should also be familiar with the Microsoft Office suite, know how to use a shared cloud database and how to create Google profiles, amongst other foundational and practical digital production and processing skills.
Collaboration & Team Mentality
Given how time-intensive coding and programming can be, effective and productive collaboration is key to working successfully in any dev team. Your developer team needs to be able to work together well to achieve goals and develop apps or software.
As such, you can design interview questions to find out a candidate’s preferences and style surrounding group projects and teamwork, such as asking about a time when they solved a problem in collaboration, and what it means to them to work on a project with others. This should separate the team players from the lone wolves.
Time Management
Developers often have busy schedules, with lots of coding, stand-ups, other work to accomplish and bug-killing to perform. In order for your developers to work effectively, they need to be able to use their time efficiently and meet deadlines.
This will make all the difference when it comes to crunch time with a looming deadline, such as a product launch. You need to be able to rely on your developers to get the job done within the required timeframes.
When building your team during the interview process, ask questions about deadlines and learn how prospective candidates manage their time with multiple tasks due. You can get specific by asking what software they use to manage their schedule and how they manage their time effectively while at their workload capacity.
Competence In Scripting & Programming Languages
While writing code is an essential skill for all software developers, there are many coding languages a person can learn. Understanding which languages you should seek in your developers requires you to know the ideal programming languages for your projects. Keep in mind that within your dev team, you might need a few different kinds to cover more bases.
Front-end developers usually create and maintain the user-facing facets of apps and websites, such as dynamic visuals and interactive fields and forms. The most common languages for front-end developers include HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which most websites are built on, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
On the other hand, back-end developers will focus on the server side of the site or application—that is, the under-the-dashboard elements that drive the user-facing service.
Organisations will use a variety of programming languages for back-end development. Some of the most common include Python, Java and the various C family of languages (such as C, C++, and C# in most cases).
Finally, full-stack developers should be fluent in both front- and back-end development, so IT professionals in this field will typically know a mix of both front- and back-end languages.
When building your devs team, you’ll want to go with a mix of front, back and full stack devs team members, depending on the requirements of the website, app or tool that you’re building.
You can consider a brief coding test or other practical skills assessment when hiring your development team to ensure that they have the coding skills and best practice knowledge required for the roles.
Proficient Code Testing
Before companies launch a piece of software into the wild for consumer use, development teams will thoroughly test it to ensure proper functionality and confirm that it is bug-free.
Developers will use digital tools to assess different aspects of the code and to decide whether it meets the stated design requirements as specified by the product owner or project manager.
Developers will also conduct tests on other specified criteria, such as cross-platform functionality (ensuring the application works on Windows and Mac, for instance) and data security.
When hiring your team, you can ask for examples of code testing they’ve done in the past or request a practical assessment to examine their testing capacity.
Source Control Management
Source control management, or SCM, is a valuable tool that facilitates teamwork among different developers. It is a system that will track changes and updates that developers make to the coding language of a specific program or application. The system can generate lists of code revisions and also restore code to a previous version if necessary.
This enables the team to work on the code independently and then merge their efforts into a single version, which is especially useful in a remote or hybrid developer team.
Try to assess candidates for knowledge of SCM systems, as you can place them within teams of multiple developers working on the same coding project. Developers who are fluent in SCM platforms such as GitLab and GitHub will be valuable additions to any development team.
Development Teams: Top Skills In Summary
Hard skills for your development team are relatively straightforward to assess. You can ask for a portfolio and scan through a candidate’s employment history to understand their experience.
However, looking for some of the soft skills we’ve mentioned too, including collaboration and time management, will help you select well-rounded developers that are capable of working well in a team.
Developers come from various backgrounds, experiences and work environments, so selecting an effective team involves cultivating a balanced knowledge base to cover as much ground in the web development process as possible.