Do We Need to Accelerate?
How can we keep the high sustainability level of development?
In the last years, I’ve been listening to people talking about productivity, high performance, and high capacity of production. We live in a world with the feeling that we are always later even when we are not. We need to study and keep ourselves updated about everything, and at the same time still keep doing our jobs.
Times like these, require us to be like a robot, spending a lot of energy in the organization, planning tasks, and time to keep your own life — study, hobbies, and family.
Software Development is a fast and sometimes injust career. Fast when it comes to daily updates, and injust because sometimes you don’t understand the current technologies and have new technologies to study every day. I believe that some points can help us to build and keep our organization and performance at a high level and avoid burnout crises.
Improve your Architecture Capabilities
- Architecture in software is much more linked with the process than the language you choose to develop the software. If you need to improve your deploy and test steps, know that choosing the loosely coupled architecture affects it much more than you imagine. It allows your team to work independently, without relying on other teams or services, keeping your delivery value very fast.
- You need to empower your team. They can choose the best tools to improve the continuous delivery, drive better software development and delivery performance. Nobody knows better your work and what we need to be effective than your team, but sometimes you need to guide them to get this value.
Improve your Product and Process
- When you deploy your application in a production environment, the first step is the gather customer feedback to improve it in the next interaction. The feedback is very important in your process, incorporate it into the design of their product to software delivery performance.
- Make the workflow visible through the value. Teams should have a good understanding and visibility into the flow of work. It is important to show all business ways and the status of products and features to customers.
- The smaller the better. Working in small batches the Team can complete the tasks in a week or less. The key to doing a good decomposition into small features that allow the fast development and release. Working with small batches enables short lead times and faster feedback loops.
Improve your Monitoring Capabilities
- Data is a powerful tool. Use the data from your application and infrastructure monitoring. Monitor across applications and infrastructure to take action and make business decisions easier and more assertive.
- Check your system proactively. Monitor system health is essential to show real-time data from applications, use alarms, and health-checks to avoid surprises, and enable teams to use preventive development strategies to mitigate problems.
- Use the work-in-progress(WIP) limits in your favor, to manage the flow of work and help with metrics like lead time and predictability. When used, this improvement in the process increases throughput and makes constraints visible in the system.
The process of software development can be complex, but with some simple changes in the cycle, we can get more productive in a competitive environment.
