The effectiveness of software engineering teams is the core of software projects’ success. Forming an effective software engineering team is a challenging task. It is possible to develop the following guidelines for creating an effective team in software engineering. First of all, the team leader should realize that people are essential in software development, and thus manage them as the most valuable assets (i.e. invest into people and ensure they are satisfied). Secondly, the team leader has to keep the team together, shape the team and ensure that actions of team members are aligned and symmetrical. Thirdly, it is necessary to balance between job variety and job specialization (Fairley, 2011). In other words, the team leader should ensure that team members have enough challenging tasks to keep their motivation high and at the same time they are competent to do their tasks, have the right skills and experience.
The implementation of the guidelines
presented in the previous paragraph depends on the project complexity and team
size. For example, it is relatively easy to pay attention to the needs and
requests of team members when the project is small, but for larger projects
composed of many teams it might be challenging to keep all team members
satisfied. In this case, it is necessary to divide the overall project team
into smaller teams, to assign leaders to each team and to have one or more
project leaders oversee the whole process of people management. As for
balancing between job variety and specialization, this task also becomes more
challenging as the project becomes bigger: larger projects often involve more
specialization. A plausible approach in this case is offering team members with
similar skills to switch places or tasks (Fairley, 2011). Finally, keeping the
team together becomes a really complex task for large projects. Assuming that
if the project is large and its members are divided into smaller teams, it
might be efficient to implement a pseudo-matrix structure when members of
different teams temporarily work together on certain assignments. Such approach
might help to build the whole project team out of smaller teams.
References
Fairley, R.E. (2011). Managing and Leading Software Projects. John Wiley & Sons.
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"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016
"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016
"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016
"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016