Good Software Development Teams don’t fall from Trees.

Building a successful development team is often not as easy as it seems. Software development teams should be self-organizing and cross-functional. At the same time, team members must make a collaborative effort when it comes to communicating and implementing shared responsibilities.

To achieve this synergy of team structure and empowerment, development teams must have the following characteristics in mind:

• The team should be naturally self-organizing where productivity depends on collective contributions.
• Teams should be well-equipped and cross-functional; they possess all the team skills necessary to advance the product across all development stages.
• Accountability belongs to the software development team as a whole.

Successful development teams have team members who:

• Leave the codebase cleaner than how they found it.
• Rather than directly criticizing people, they criticize their ideas.
• Share past and present experiences to offer new team insights.
• Have fun with each other and trust each other.