So you have decided to order a WebApp from a web development agency (or you might have already made an order). You are a client, and nobody expects you to know all the intricacies of the process. But what can be really helpful for your further communication is to know who is who in a Web development team that is in charge of your project.
With a set of 3 articles I will try to explain a Web Development in a nutshell for newcomers:
- Outsourcing models;
- Web development team structure: roles and responsibilities;
- Expenses on Tools and IT infrastructure during the development stage.
Expenses on tools and IT infrastructure during the development stage
When you start a web development project for the first time, you may ask yourself what are the other then direct development costs are possible. Even though they are usually not big it will bring you peace of mind if you understand their structure. Here I prepared a monthly cost structure of an average team up to 10 team members.
IT Infrastructure expenses | Subscription fee | Subtotal |
---|---|---|
LaSoft expenses | ||
Jira Software Tool for tasks and bug development | $10.00 | $10.00 |
Invision InVision is the digital product design platform used to make the world's best customer experiences. | $25.00 | $25.00 |
Zeplin Connected space for product teams. Handoff designs and styleguides with accurate specs, assets, code snippets—automatically. | $19.00 | $19.00 |
Flowmap Online tool for creating a sitemap, user flow and personas that help you to effectively design and plan best UX. | $12.75 | $12.75 |
$66.75 | ||
Client's expenses | ||
Server infrastructure Development, Staging and Production servers on Heroku. Initially, during the development stage, we do not plan a high-load, and we will need two instances. Each instance will cost $7 each. | $14.00 | $14.00 |
CircleCI CI/CD tool, trial version for the 1st month | $30.00 | $30.00 |
Auth0 Auth0 authentification plugin. Auth0 has a free plan, we plan to use it at this point. Later it is possible that we will need to from free to developer plan which will cost $23/month | $0.00 | $0.00 |
$44.00 | ||
Total | $110.75 |
As you can see, there are a set of tools for UI/UX designers, software developers, project managers, etc. Each of those tools is needed and improves the cooperation quality, communication and productivity of a development team.
If you work with a service provider like LaSoft, most probably the agency will take care of a good amount of tools for the project, however, you will need to provide cloud infrastructure and related to it tools like CircleCI or Jenkins.
Definitely, there are a lot of other interesting tools you may use for your project needs like Rocketlog, and Hotjar.
Also, your cloud server infrastructure can be more complex and sophisticated, something I suggested above, can be considered as a bare minimum.
Please let me know what other topics may be interesting for you to discover in a modern web development process.