Hello,
The question you are asking is vast... Basically you are asking about project management.
One of the current very strong trends to manage a development team and distribute work among team member is the Agile process.
Agile comes in plenty of different flavours, Scrum is a very popular one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development[
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)[
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The idea is to not try planning to much ahead, just do the minimum, the project is express as "Stories" that are small enough to be implemented during a "Sprint" (2, 3 weeks). All the Stories put together are called the "Product backlog" and this actually the Specifications.
The development is organised in an iterative way, each morning the team meets and say what they did the day before, what the will do today, and what problems they have. The meetings are conducted by a Scrum master and are typically no more than 15 minutes. During the daily meeting if a team member has issues delivering a story it becomes quickly obvious, and it is then easy to react and reassign tasks.
The implementation of a story during a sprint requires that each story is fully tested.
Basically that's a how many companies deal with the problems of managing team, making people cooperate and dealing with delivering softwares.
If you are interested in Agile, do a search on Google. There are millions of websites about it.
Valery.
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