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By Romans Malinovskis, Lead Developer of Agile Toolkit | | What is the best advice for starting a Development Team? What do you consider the best successfull methods for obtaining the right members? I started one with classmates but just 2 of us are motivated | 1 comment » | Started by Thomas France, Web Programmer / Student at Blackhawk Technical College | | HI Thomas
Interesting question. I think most importantly for you is to have a vision and goal which you and other team-mates will share. Even if you hire developers you would want them to have similar ideals as you.
In my case I have started my team 8 years ago and our goal was to advance technically. We wanted to build software capable of handling 5k web requests per second, or turn around thousands of dollars per day in sales / purchases. Ambitious goals like those is important for motivation. Now I have a new team and a new goals.
The biggest challenge I have faced is profitability. Most of our clients whom we offer web software are looking to get a quote and putting price / deadline on functionality is always tricky. It must be very clear for all team members how you earn money and what they need to do for company to be more successful. It also must be clear for customers on what you will do and what you are not going to do.
We have tried to perfect and automate the process. At the end we wrote our own software. It's amazing at how many project management tools we looked at but still couldn't find something which would simply be able to answer the following questions:
[to developer] - what should I work on next?
[to manager] - how much % of functionality is complete and how much % of budget is spent?
[to client] - is project on-time?
Ability to answer further questions is important too like how efficient are members of your teams, or which projects or tasks you spend too much time on.
Finally the proper evaluation period is always good. I hire remotely and I always on the look for ninja-coders who can work at a lightning speed. I ask them to share screen and watch them work. It answers many questions right away.
I would suggest not to hire people who are too obsessed with monetary questions. If you are a new team, you would most probably have cashflow issues initially so it's important that each team members would know what they could do to prevent those.
The software I have mentioned is called Colubris and it's distributed under AGPL license. https://github.com/agiletech/colubris It's still in quite early stage, but if you are good with PHP - you can tweak it into your own way - feel free to contact me directly with questions. By Romans Malinovskis, Lead Developer of Agile Toolkit | | PHP vs Ruby on Rails which one is better? | 25 comments » | Started by Vishwadeep Rangari, Business Developement Manager at Josh Software Private Limited Pune | | @Jim I code a lot of sites without a framework, in fact frameworks would not be advisable on a site such as facebook or youtube kinda...
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