The central role of software engineering teams is to solve problems using codes. Looking at the advancements in Tech, from the devices you are reading this article with to the powerful supercomputers that hold our files on the cloud, the unimaginable AI models, and the programs that take humans out of this planet, you can see the wonders made by software engineers.

However, even the most experienced and well-managed software engineering teams face challenges that cannot be solved solely with code. African software engineering teams are not left out.

These challenges are usually not external, and if not properly tackled, they can derail the team's progress and efficiency.

This Tribesquare article discusses some challenges facing African software engineering teams and how to overcome them.

1. Rapid Advancement of Technology

Just like content creators chase the latest iPhones and cameras to produce high-quality videos, every technological advancement adds another layer of pressure for African software engineering teams to adopt innovations when creating or refining products to help them stand out in the market.

If this pressure is not well managed, it may result in a broken software development process and malfunctioning products due to the infusion of multiple technologies in the development process.

How to Stay Up to Date with Technology Advancements

Prepare your team to study each innovation, determining whether it is relevant to your products and how much value it can potentially add to your bottom line. If it is valuable to your product or niche, encourage and sponsor some of your engineers to acquire additional training on the new technology.

1. Limited Resources

The lack of high-performing programming tools, ineffective data storage structures, bad networks and connections, and epileptic power supplies all lower the productivity of African engineering teams.

How to Solve the Problem of Limited Resources

This challenge is more straightforward to tackle, although it is expensive.

Ensure you provide your engineering teams with the needed Tech and physical infrastructure to perform optimally.

Work with highly effective tools and data storage structures, provide reliable internet connectivity devices, and use solar or diesel-powered generators as alternatives to the power generated by power holding companies.

1. Lack of Workflow Visibility

The progress of many African engineering teams is impeded because team members do not clearly understand the organization’s engineering processes. The status of individual team members' projects, activities, and challenges remain vague in such teams.

This is largely a result of inadequate communication, ineffective collaboration, and poor team coordination.

How to solve the Lack of Visibility Issue

Adopt project management tools that help your teams stay organized and synced to important activities going on in the team.

You can also create a dedicated spreadsheet where every team member reports their daily activities, milestones, and targets for each week. This creates a form of personal accountability within the team.

With these measures, every team member can check the organizational chat or spreadsheet and get a high-level overview of what is going on in the organization

1. Managing Communication and Collaboration

As the engineering team grows, it becomes difficult to manage and coordinate communication between team members, especially when the team works remotely with members scattered in different parts of the continent. This coordination issue results to delays or other issues that affects team work.

How to Manage Communication Properly

Use project management tools like Slack, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Docs to communicate, track progress, and collaborate with team members in real time.

1. Broken Software Development Processes

Broken software development processes are basically execution issues that creep in when you do not define your processes clearly, when there is no appropriate documentation, or when you do not train your team members properly.

A broken SDLC would fail to spot changing requirements, thereby causing scope creep and project delays, technical debt (the temporary solutions or suboptimal code that may need to be refactored in the future).

Your software Development process can be broken at different levels, which includes the following:

• Improper code reviews

• Unclear or unhelpful documentation

• Inadequate testing due to time limitation

• Lack of compliance to relevant regulatory requirements

How to Solve the Broken Software Development Challenge

Create a clear requirement document showing a product's aims, scope, limitations, and functional requirements, and ensure that the requirements are met through your Quality Assurance Engineers.

Also, ensure adequate debugging and testing to meet the intended quality.

1. Time Limitation

Speed is an important asset in software engineering. In Africa, where most tech advancements are still in infancy, software engineering teams need to execute superiorly and quickly to beat competitors.

Hence, these teams set very short project deadlines, which puts a lot of pressure on them. Developing products under pressure can affect productivity and the quality of the end product if not properly managed.

How to Solve the Problem of Time Limitation

Plan your projects adequately and set reasonable and feasible deadlines for your software engineering teams to allow them to produce high-quality software.

1. Lack of Predictability in Software Delivery

Software delivery can be unpredictable. Experienced software Engineers know this. The APIs and Third-party libraries you integrate into your projects require regular updates, which can result in a series of unending dependencies, especially when these libraries are deprecated.

Also, bugs can multiply quickly, like cockroaches reproduce, and mess up your customer experience.

How to Solve the Predictability Issue

• Minimize your dependency on external libraries.

• Use agile software development methodologies.

• Create an efficient software development process with adequate code review and quality assurance.

• Use engineering analytics tools like Haystack and Waydev to understand the health of your products and improve where necessary.

• Improve your planning strategies to reduce scope creep.

1. Need for Development Velocity to Meet Increasing Customer Expectations

African software engineers need to update and ship new features to keep up with or beat competitors or meet customers’ ever-changing demands and expectations.

The need for these frequent changes keeps your engineering teams on their toes. If there is developer churn or attrition, the engineering process may slow down.

How to Accelerate Development Process to Meet Customers’ Expectations

• Detect and fix bugs early.

• Set up your team to analyze the market, understand where the market is going and what competitors are doing, and decide how to stay ahead of the curve.

• Build fast and deploy updates to receive quick feedback and improve where necessary.

1. Unclear Customer Needs

Sometimes, customers want to add more features to their products, especially here in Africa, where most budding entrepreneurs only have a basic understanding of the product requirements. This can lead to many back-and-forths in the development process.

How to Tackle Unclear Customer Needs

1. Discuss with your customers to understand exactly what product they want and its features.

2. Your engineering team should serve as educators to customers. As the experts, you understand the product requirements better than the customers who may not be programmers.

Hence, you should suggest the best ways to build the products and explain to the customers why those tools and strategies are the best. This ensures that the Engineering team and the customers are on the same page before development.

Also, keep in touch with your customers throughout the development process to communicate progress and obtain feedback.

1. Security and Performance Challenges

A software application should be designed to perform optimally, be secure, and be scalable a. Due to constant cyber security threats and unauthorized access to personal data, security has never been more important.

Suppose your quality assurance and code review processes are flawed, your software testing process is inadequate, your code is not correctly documented, or your infrastructure is poorly configured; security and performance challenges may arise.

How to Improve Software Security and Performance

• Fortify your products against attacks, and include sophisticated access controls and data encryption into applications. Update your security architecture regularly to take care of new forms of attacks.

• Clearly define coding standards to build high-performance products.

• Use security testing tools and platforms for security audits.

• Adhere to industry security compliance and regulations.

1. Developer Burn-out

A recent survey shows that 83% of developers have been burned out at some point in their careers.

The major reasons for developer burnout include too many workloads, inefficient processes, and unrealistic targets and deadlines.

The resultant developer burn-outs derail work and leads to poor customer experience if the needs of these customers are not met.

How to prevent Developer Burn-out

Be receptive and attentive to your developers' well-being. Offer time off and grant leaves to allow your engineers to cool off.

1. Managing Talents and Maintaining Cohesion

As the team grows, managing individual talents and skills becomes difficult. This leads to knowledge silos and talent gaps in extreme cases.

Also, maintaining cohesion among team members becomes increasingly burdensome, which can lead to broken collaboration.

This negatively impacts the team’s ability to collaborate and work together efficiently.

How to Manage Software Engineering Talents

Team management is an important aspect of running a tech business, but most founders do not adequately handle it.

However, companies like Tribesquare offer team management services to save you the stress of hiring and coordinating software engineering talents so you can focus on other aspects of your business.

Tribesquare teams include hand-picked experts who can guarantee your business stability and effective management while you retain control of your products and processes.

If you need help with team management or building software development and technical teams, contact Tribesquare. Let us eliminate your team-building and management headaches.