In today’s competitive software product development market, speed to market is your biggest competitive advantage. How do you streamline software development without burning out your developers? Burnout causes turnover, and turnover causes project delays. Hiring more developers isn’t the answer, either. In fact, you might be surprised to discover that pre-planning, and repositioning what you expect out of your software developers, are vital parts of speeding up software development – without killing morale.
Before You Streamline, Figure Out the Process
The first thing to do before you can streamline your software development is to take a step back and understand the value chain delivery process. How are you delivering value? At a high level, you receive requirements from the customer, these go into software development, and the result is production-quality software to their specifications.
Many teams lack an understanding of what happens in the development stage of this process. Unlike a physical factory, with virtual development, you can’t see the products in process on the floor. You may not understand how the software products flow from one stage to the next because it’s virtual. Before you try to automate this process and run the risk of doing so inefficiently, you need to understand the process and then you can introduce automation, software development accelerators, and other tools that will speed up your software development.
How Does Understanding the Process Improve Morale?
If you don’t understand the development process, it doesn’t matter what tools you have to offer. You are setting the team up for failure. Make sure your team is aligned with your business goals so everyone can work toward the same milestones together. Standardize the tools being used and reduce the chaos.
When everyone understands the timeline and expectations, it removes the element of surprise for the developer. Planning before you streamline protects morale by avoiding unexpected fires.
Software development has a psychological component that many aren’t aware of. Most software engineers are culturized to be heroes, to be firefighters. If there are no fires, if there is nothing to save, most software developers don’t receive the recognition or kudos they deserve.
Instead of setting your developers up to impress you with their ability to put out fires, let them know that they will impress you most by executing a plan that keeps fires from ever starting.
Do You Have to Hire More Developers to Develop Software Faster?
Hiring developers adds capacity – not speed.
Once you understand the process, you will see which areas of the process can become more efficient with your existing team. This is where proper tool use comes into play.
Do you have the right tools? In your pre-planning stage, perhaps you found that you are doing something manually that could be automated by a tool. On the other hand, you could have a tool that’s creating friction: if you need a full-time person to manage a tool, I’m willing to bet there’s a better, more efficient tool out there that won’t require so much time and effort from your development staff.
Keep in mind that your communication becomes more complex with each additional person you add. You should be hiring developers when you are looking to increase development capacity, not speed.
Three Key Steps to Streamline Software Development Without Killing Morale
Streamlining your software development process and reducing cycle time in software delivery doesn’t have to kill morale for your developers. Consider these three key steps to facilitate the process:
1. Software Product Roadmap
The best thing you can do to encourage developers and keep morale up is to give them visibility into the business end of things. Explain how the code they are writing is going to impact the client and the greater community. Keep developers excited and involved in ways other than just technical knowledge. Showing them that they have a greater impact will help them to be more efficient. A software product roadmap will help you direct this process.
Be sure your development goals are in full alignment with the business goals. McKinsey research has found that “bold, tightly integrated strategies” deliver more value more often, finding that 47 percent of companies with such strategies in place reported organic revenue growth of 10 percent or higher.
2. Understand Technical Debt
The more technical debt you have, the more time your developers have to spend fixing things instead of creating value for your clients. The typical shop, with a well-organized team, usually spends about 70% of their time fixing issues, which leaves only 30% to develop new products and features. For less organized teams, you could be looking at 10% or less of the time dedicated to building new software products!
To reduce technical debt, understand what’s breaking. Look at your support tickets and figure out where you can eliminate the top 20% of recurring issues that keep your support and R&D teams busy week after week. By organizing and understanding where the friction is, you can fix the problems and free up valuable time. This will improve your support team’s morale, which in turn will improve developer morale as it frees up more time to work on cool new projects instead of fighting old fires.
3. Automate
Automation keeps your developers focused on the tasks they enjoy and the problems that need the creativity of the human brain to resolve. In a recent survey by GitHub, only 38 percent of respondents said their implementations included continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and only 29 percent said their implementations include test automation. Forty-seven percent listed testing as a top bottleneck, even though only 12 percent said they’ve implemented full test automation.
By planning ahead and ensuring you understand your process, you will keep morale up. When morale is high, you get better output.
It is time to change the way we think about software developers and the software development process. Encourage your developers to write code in the most efficient way possible and you will find they stick around longer, reduce cycle times, and speed up software development naturally.
Don’t go it alone
Help your existing team do more, faster, without extra stress with the powerful automation and prebuilt components waiting for your team in PlatformPlus®.