Which (programming) specialities are needed in a good web development team? [closed]

Question

At first glance, I'd say a good programming team needs to understand the following matters:

• The details of the core language / framework
• HTML, (asynchronous) javascript
• SQL / data model
• Usability / UI design
• Security
• Project management.

If this team is not complete: what is needed?

Answer 1

Customer (or an advocate of some sort).

Basically, someone that can say, "Yes, you're building what I want and it's going to solve my problem." or that the team can go to when they have questions about how something is supposed to work. That may or may not be the same person that is doing Project Management.

Also, you're missing out on a QA person there. You can't really depend on the developers to adequately test - they're usually too close to the code and the normal response for developers is to test happy path stuff, not doing weird crap like copy pasting War & Peace into a textbox and seeing what the application does.

Answer 2

A good development team is nothing without some support:

One major role that's missing is IT: systems administration, networking, etc. There are a lot of developers whose knowledge of how computer systems work stop at the compiler.

I'd also add a manager to handle vendor contracts and other support aspects of a development team.

Answer 3

A programming savvy Graphic Designer. A graphic designer for web needs to understand the limitations of web graphics and concepts like graceful fallback. HTML5 and CSS3 are making a big push, but until those are here, your graphic designer needs to understand the limits of CSS2 and XHTML.

Answer 4

Developers that know Regular Expressions properly.

For example: data validation, mod_rewrite rules, analysing logs, and so on.

There's many situations where regex knowledge can be a great help. And probably even more where knowing not to use (or ask for) a regex, because it isn't the best tool, will save time.