Anatomy of an Effective Web Development Team

When it comes to forming a good team, these are the bones of what you need. Skipping any of the following elements will expose your business to unnecessary risk. Keep in mind that too that the subjects mentioned below are extremely simplified. You will need more than a shopping list of products to put them in place, namely some actual know-how.

Code Repositories

You need version control with a place to store the canonical copy of our code base in a way that is secure and easily accessible to all members of the team. I strongly recommend Git and Git services.

RISKS TO AVOID: Lost or corrupt code, multiple asynchronous copies

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: GitHub, Bitbucket

Agile Processes

We need Project Management performed using Agile methodologies with limited work in progress. A product owner should be appointed to represent the primary stakeholders and provide requirements, review deliverables and give daily feedback for the primary stakeholders.

RISKS TO AVOID: Unnecessary constraints in development, lack of production, inability to control budget, schedule or scope.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Kanban, Scrum, Lean, XP, Crystal, FDD, DSDM

Agile PM Software

While it's possible for some teams to run a kanban board using sticky notes, the most efficient way to implement project management in an agile way is with the proper software.

RISKS TO AVOID: Loss of reports, loss of stakeholder confidence, lack of team communication

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Jira, LeanKit

Secure Deployment

It's inherently dangerous for anyone to develop alone or in a vacuum of collaborators. You need at least two qualified developers to perform code review and testing. Deployment procedures should include release tagging and stable rollback procedures.

RISKS TO AVOID: Multiplied bugs, deployment disasters, security issues

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: New hires, contractors, development interns

Secure Hosting Environments

Development should never take place on the production environment. Using subdomains of the primary domain, we need a triad of environments, where production websites are cloned by copies for staging and development. Each of the environments should be compartmentalized into separate public and administrative faces for added security.

RISKS TO AVOID: Embarrassing bugs, service outages, unseen breaches in security.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Various cloud products

Contracts with SLA's

Each contract for hosting, operations or development should include certain service level agreements to ensure continued security, integrity and availability.

RISKS TO AVOID: Increased down time, security risks

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Subject to your own busines requirements