So you have decided to order a web app from a web app development company (or perhaps you have already placed an order). You are a client, and no one expects you to know all the intricacies of the process. Knowing who is in the web application development process responsible for your project can be helpful for your further communication with the team.

LaSoft’s Web App Development Company Team Structure

Not the most advanced software technologies, not expensive high-speed hardware, not financial capital, but people—they are the greatest asset in any team. They use technology to deliver value to the end user. LaSoft comprises 16 development teams working in different locations, equating to 110+ experienced, cross-functional professionals. Somewhere along the way, we learned that involving cross-functional, collaborative teams helps maximize value, eliminate waste, and increase the chances of project and client business success.

In particular, our web app development company team includes:

• Software engineers (Front-end, Back-end, DevOps);
• UI/UX (user interface/user experience) designers,
• Project managers / Scrum masters,
• Business Analyst 
• QA (Quality Assurance) specialists.

Our team combines expertise and skills to deliver better solutions and results to end users. Some inexperienced entrepreneurs try to save costs by eliminating some of the roles in their teams. However, we have learned that not filling at least one role will most likely lead to many losses and quality issues, while the whole team becomes much more efficient and productive when everyone is in place. To help you better understand the value of each role, I invite you to learn more about each team member.

UI/UX Designer

Nowadays, one can hardly imagine building web applications without a UI/UX Design. Despite all the popularity, most people have trouble distinguishing UI and UX design. If you are one of them, don’t worry—you’re not alone!

“A great product experience starts with UX followed by UI. Both are essential for the product’s success.”

While UI (user interface) design concerns colors, typography, composition, and visual elements, UX design covers how customers interact with the web application throughout the customer journey. While UI is responsible for the beauty and emotional aspect of your system, UX is responsible for its usability and clarity. In our opinion, both are very important. 

Though UX design is more dependent on analytics and testing, UI and UX are inseparable parts of modern web applications. In a web development team, one person is most often in charge of both UI and UX design.

Andriy Tatchyn, a founder at LaSoft, said, “We strongly recommend that all of our clients have UI/UX design before they start the application’s development. Our research shows it can lead to significant cost savings, potentially reducing project budgets by 35-50% through minimized rework and miscommunication.”

LaSoft team strongly advocates having UI/UX design ready even before you write your first line of code. Without UI/UX design, developing a nice and user-friendly application is impossible. This upfront investment will save you 35–50% in project costs by minimizing rework and miscommunication. Moreover, if you have a UI/UX design, you can explain your idea better to your investors and potential users, which is a good part of idea validation. 

In most projects, you do not need a UI/UX Designer for the entire project length; you need this role in the first 2-3 months and later, a UI/UX designer can be involved episodically just to support your system style.

Business Analyst

When you do a web application development project, explaining your idea in 5 sentences will not help your web developers build the system you want. The business analyst, the one who works with clients and potential users, collects and documents system requirements. The document part is even more important as a team needs to be “on the same page” about what exactly they have to build, and the documentation helps them to be on the same page. 

Cost savings tip: “Usually, for teams with less than ten people, you do not need a full-time Business Analyst; you need the person to develop a Professional Project Specification, and later, a Project Manager can keep it up to date.”

In LaSoft, business analysts are involved only at the beginning of the project for up to one month. They collect all the requirements in a professional manner and prepare The Project’s Technical Specifications. Some may think this is a waste of time, but it is the opposite. 

Most of the time, projects fail because they “sail without any navigation”, and the Project Specification prepared by the Business Analyst is your “Destination map.”

Software engineer (Front-end, Back-end, Full-stack)

In a web development team structure, software engineers are divided into those who are in charge of the front-end and work with web application development frameworks and those who are in charge of the back-end side. Some of them can do both, they are called Full-stack developers. Now, let’s briefly cover what it means.

The front-end side is the one that you see and can interact with. It consists of design elements, such as buttons, menus, images, text, and overall layout. The code that a front-end developer wrote defines how those elements behave. For instance, you get a pop-up registration form when you scroll down the website.

Cost savings tip: “Sometimes, when you do your system validations, you may develop only a prototype or a front-end part, which will reduce your development budget by at least 50%, and you will still be able to show the system to your potential users”. 

Yet, some front-end elements also serve as triggers for back-end operations. Let’s get back to the pop-up registration form. When a user enters details and presses the button “Register” (or whatever else it’s called), their information is validated on the front-end side and then saved to the database, which is part of the back-end.

Back-end development entails operations that are invisible to a user yet are crucial for the work of any web app development team. The back-end part of web apps usually includes a database management system, and web server and server-side applications.

Free advice: “Never ask back-end developers to implement front-end part unless you want your system to look awful”.

Front-End vs Back-End

Definition of Role

The front-end developers create the user-facing functionality of web apps. In other words, they create everything that users can see (interaction design and user experience)

The back-end developers play a vital role in the web application development team. They work with infrastructure that is not visible to users but ensures the web app product consistently functions as it should.

The back-end code describes interactions between these elements and between them and the front-end part. The coordinated work of front-end and back-end developers is crucial for every web project, which would be impossible without any of these parts.

QA Specialists

Testing is one of the essential parts of web application development – just like front-end and back-end development, design, and project management. For this reason, every web app development team has quality assurance engineers who design and apply tests during the active development process to resolve any issues before the product goes into production and check the cross-platform capabilities of web-based applications. The primary purpose of testing is to prevent poor-quality products from reaching the market. Quality assurance looks at the code from the other side, which is impossible for the coder. In addition, testing makes bugs much cheaper as they are detected at an early stage of development.

Without the right Q&A expert and quality assurance process, bugs will end up on your production web servers no matter how good a developer you hire.

The role of a QA engineer is not just important; it’s critical to the success of a project. They play a pivotal role in ensuring software quality in accordance with technical specifications, preventing bugs, and ultimately maintaining user satisfaction. Their contribution is a necessity for the overall success of a project.

Project Manager

Every IT project requires project management. A project manager is responsible for a project’s Budget, Scope, Schedule, and Quality. They also manage workflows, connect all the dots of the web application development process, and ensure that every stakeholder is on the same page regarding the project’s progress and goals.  

The Project Manager ensures clear communication between the client and the team, and each team member knows and understands the goals for each Sprint, Release, and overall project direction using project management tools. The Project Manager decomposes bigger components into smaller, specific tasks or user stories, adds needed descriptions, plans delivery, communicates status, and resolves project issues. Also, he/she ensures the team is motivated, focused, and enthusiastic. You can delve into the topic and find out what may happen if you run a project without a Project Manager. 

Conclusion

So, here we go! You finally have a complete picture of the team roles of the web app development company. Each individual member and all of them together transform your ideas and plans into a finished product. Now you may realize how diverse their roles are, and I hope it helps you communicate with the team during the development process.

If you’d like to learn more about our LaSoft web development practices, don’t hesitate to ask — we are all here for you!