Importance of teamwork in software development

Teamwork is working together to achieve a common goal. It enables people with different ideas and capabilities to come together and share their knowledge. When people with different views meet and exchange, they can drive imagination and creativity. This leads to massive knowledge sharing across the team members which adds a lot of value to the organization.

In software development, lack of teamwork in the worst-case scenario can lead to company closer or project termination. It is very hard to achieve anything if not working as a team. Not meeting deadlines means the project will not be delivered on budget and customer expectations not met.

For management, before kick-starting a project, they have two major things on their side. Budget and timeline. Their responsibility is to provide a good working environment for product delivery. After their part is done, their focus goes entirely on product delivery which is the project output. Some managements are never even concerned with the development team weekly or monthly timelines. Their major concern is the final delivery on the stipulated date. Short timelines i.e. in agile development are a guideline for lead developers. Project managers are more concerned about retrospective meetings or lead developers to face to face updates.

Project delivery is based on the daily coding done by developers. They are playing a very important role. Therefore, they need good support and a working environment from both lead and management. A well-organized team has always a competent lead. Passive teams always imply poor leadership. With poor leadership, things must always go wrong.

A lead developer can make things happen or screw up everything in a team. When you are a leader, you are in charge of a team, it is your team. When you try something stupid i.e. micromanaging developers, be sure you have no team other than a bunch of guys that you will sink with. However, some leads believe in micromanagement and bossing everyone around. What they don’t know is that developers will submit to the subjection but will go volatile. They will quit anytime. Others resort to writing bad code that works to meet the current situation requirements.

On leadership, the management should be very kin on that. The simplest way to tell if a lead developer is competent as a lead is from the team motivation and throughput. Constant overheads and pointing of fingers mean there is a major problem. These problems sometimes are very costly to fix. A project can end up taking more than double the set duration and budget. More badly, a fucked up product that fails constantly and does not meet all customer requirements appropriately. A product that management will use a lot of resources to fix over time. Angry dissatisfied customers.

A good team will self-oversee. This will help in making accurate project estimations. It is hard to estimate the time a module in a project will take if members of a team are not working together. It is very hard to fail in hitting timelines when working as a team. This leads to a major challenge where a date is simply fixed and is never achieved. This always leads to the pointing of fingers where developers are blaming each other after failing to deliver. But this issue is mostly a leadership problem. When members are working as a team and are well motivated, time estimation is never a problem. It won’t lead to heated discussions and negotiations. Members define a date and in most cases, they deliver beyond expectation.

In a good team, team members will always help each other when facing any obstacle. At any given time, developers in a team will never have equal experience or expertise. A developer might be straggling to find a way to fix a problem taking hours or days while there is someone in the team who had cracked the same problem before. In a good team, all members are aware of what each is working on. And developers feel free to update others on the challenges they are facing even though minor. In a toxic team, this is not even possible. But helping each other minimizes delivery time and even improves on quality.

In a team where members are working collaboratively, there is a lot of learning from each other. Developers share skills, they discuss ideas thereby improving their skills in general. Learning is a continuous process in software development. When you stop learning, you die technically. Technology will leave you far behind since it keeps growing and changing constantly. There are many ways to learn as a software developer but always try to learn from your team members. You should not be a negative person who will learn just to discover other developers' weaknesses and capitalize on them. That is the spirit that kills teamwork.

The other most important thing in a team is reviewing each other’s work. This one is very important and does not work completely in toxic teams. Reviewing other developers' code means reading others' code. Reading other developers' code can help in improving your skills. In a good team, members give others code review feedback. Reviewing each other code will lead to having a codebase with a common standard of coding. It makes it very easy to fix another developer code when he is not around or occupied with something else. It also makes it very easy for a new developer who is coming on board to catch-up.

A good spirit of teamwork makes it easy and improves on many processes towards product delivery. Communication is key when working as a team. It is not just communication, but on-time communication. Late communication sometimes is as good as no communication at all. If having a problem, communicate to the team on time. If overseeing a problem, let the team know on time. Good communication removes a lot of overheads in teamwork and should be prioritized.

Sometimes too, it is important to have communication channels in a team i.e. emails, slack, etc. This will ensure that members don’t forget easily. It is also a very important tool when having a toxic team. It reduces finger-pointing by over 50%. In finger-pointing, you hear a lot of “I told him”, “he did not tell me”, “he did not communicate on time”, etc. Have a messaging system.

It can be very hard or very easy to have good working teamwork. It starts with management. Poor management, poor teams, and vice versa.