- The Design Team
- The Development Team
- Team Development Tools Included In Oracle Developer
- Conclusion
The Development Team
With the design competed, you are ready to begin coding the application. Your graphics designer should work closely with the developers to create the initial templates used by your coders. After the initial screens and reports have been created, the graphics designer can be left to create any special graphics used on the forms or reports.
All developers should report to a team leader, who can be the development manager or a coworker. However, there needs to be one individual that you can use to coordinate development efforts. The team leader will then be responsible for interacting with management to convey changes in schedule or requests for resources.
Most Oracle Developer projects will only utilize interface coders. These are the software developers responsible for putting together forms, reports, graphs, and menus. If you have a mix of experienced and novice developers on your team, it is best to pair an inexperienced developer with an experienced one. This provides a help resource to used when the inexperienced developer has a question or is stuck on a problem. If you have more inexperienced developers than experienced ones, it is time to send one or two of the inexperienced developers to training. Hopefully, this training can be completed before the actual application coding begins.
On some Oracle Developer projects, you will need to have low-level coders. Perhaps you have some PL/SQL stored procedures or Java code that will be used throughout the application. The low-level coders will need to do the work. They should also have access to low-level testers to verify the code before it is incorporated by all of the interface developers.
In managing large projects, I have found it necessary to include a build-master on the development team. If your team is only two or three coders, one of the developers can serve as the build-master. For larger teams, this will need to be a dedicated position. The build-master is responsible for taking all of the application code developed by the other engineers and making sure it builds into a complete system. If one of the low-level coders makes a change that breaks all the interface code, the build-master can notify the team leader to help get the problem solved.