Setting up the development team

Useful tips on how to prepare your team for application development with Betty Blocks.

After you’ve defined the MVP of your application with all the primary features, the time has come to gather the right people with the appropriate skill set to get the action started! This article will continue navigating your journey into app development with Betty Blocks by exploring key steps required for assembling an efficient and capable development team.

Complexity and risks

Although Betty Blocks provides pretty easy app-building solutions and you would want to jump into creating your product right away, we want to warn you that success doesn’t come by chance - it's a result of constant revisiting of chosen paths. So first, let’s start with a little recap.

Before assembling your team, it’s important to thoroughly understand the complexity and risks associated with your solutions. Consider the scope and scale of the application you plan to build using Betty Blocks. Evaluate the potential challenges, dependencies, and integration requirements.

Is your project relatively straightforward or highly complex? Are there any regulatory or security considerations? By understanding the complexity and risk factors, you can better determine the expertise and experience levels needed within your development team. This assessment will guide your decision-making process throughout the team formation.

As for technical complexity, we need to evaluate their levels by measuring how difficult it is to:

• Build the application’s front end, data models, and functionality (actions)

• Set up the integrations with other systems

• Create desired UI/UX

It’s important to check not only the level of technical complexity but also the level of uncertainty, for example, the lack of information on API specifications

Depending on the levels of risks and complexity, we will need to decide which path of development we should take. Nominally, they can be divided into fast-track path, assisted path, or IT delivery (outsourcing path). Let’s come back to them in detail after we mention the development roles at Betty Blocks.

Roles and skills

When it comes to development roles within the Betty Blocks platform, we differentiate three primary ones: citizen developer, business technologist, and low-code developer.

The citizen developer is the entry-level development role that is characterized by light-touch governance. The citizen development team would take a project that is considered low risk and low technical complexity, which is a fast-track path. No matter how low the overall complexity is, citizen developers never start application development from scratch, instead, they use either templates or some applications started and supported by more experienced roles. The emphasis here is on iterative ideation, design, build, and deployment with continuous business feedback loops. Basically, it’s an Agile development without the classic roles like product owner, scrum master, etc.

The assisted path is followed if, after the initial assessment, the initiative is deemed medium technical complexity and low risk. This is the time when business technologist comes into action. They are more experienced and have a business application-building background, knowing certain rules of development. Business technologists can assist citizen developers with their skills - this allows the citizen developer to progress quickly without extensive IT engagement.

Sometimes the citizen development team is able to build an MVP, and at some point engage with business technologists or low-code developers to finish the application and prepare it for the live environment. In other cases, business technologists might serve as a core developer role in setting up the primary building processes and aligning them with business value while citizen developers can be responsible for configuring, updating, and maintaining applications.

As you might have guessed, with rather complex solutions that have high levels of risk, the application development can be outsourced to Betty Blocks or their partners and assigned to our low-code and pro-code IT specialists. In such cases, the work will be done within the classic Agile/Scrum environment and roles, like product owner, UI/UX designer, development team, etc.

Hiring team members

Having gathered all this information, you will have enough knowledge to evaluate the skills of future team members to build an MVP of your application. First of all, check availability within the team that was assigned to work on this product. If there are team members with the required skills, they can take on additional responsibilities and provide guidance to support others.

If the required skills cannot be found within the existing team, consider checking other departments or even hiring external team members. There may be individuals with relevant knowledge of low-code/no-code platforms and development who can bring lots of benefits to the project.

Once the team is hired, it’s important to foster collaboration between team members. Establish effective communication channels, regular daily meetings, and space to share ideas and tackle challenges. Encourage team members to share their thoughts, suggestions, and ideas openly, as well as timely feedback.

We recommend using Agile methodology for iterative development, continuous improvement, and frequent feedback loops. Implementing Agile ceremonies, such as daily stand-up meetings, sprint planning sessions, and retrospectives, can help the team stay aligned, track progress, and make necessary adjustments throughout the development process. These practices encourage transparency, collaboration, and accountability among team members, enabling them to work together more effectively toward the project's goals. Good luck!