These simple tips by an IT Guru will improve your Tech Development Cycle!
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Vincent Paul Toscano, an ex-employee at Infosys, with an experience of more than 10 years in the IT domain. The main topic of discussion was what practices are followed in the corporate tech teams that can or should be adopted by startups and budding companies that are trying to get their productivity in place. The amount of knowledge I gained in that short period of time was incredible. I would like to summarise some simple practices below that can help companies to boost their tech development productivity quickly.
Standup!
Every team should have a small standup meeting of 10–15 minutes everyday. The meeting should be short and concise but should help the team members know overall progress of the project as well as what any other team member is working on. For larger teams, the tech team can have its own standup meetings. The reason for this might be that the tech team get distracted with the activity happening in the marketing with regards to the targets and revenues which can affect the teams performance.
Code Reviews!
Code reviews should become an integral part of the tech teams’ code development cycle. Every code that gets pushed to the code repository should be verified by the team members for any errors in logic or team style guidelines etc. To avoid common errors that happen regularly and to avoid trivial tasks that might have to be repeated by the reviewers, the team should have a self review checklist. The self review check list should contains about 5–10 key points that the developer should review in their code before submitting it for review. This helps the developer to review their own code and not just be dependant on reviewers to find potential issues.
Automate!
A very common issue that is faced by many developers is doing some manual tasks on the system that are fairly repetitive. The idea should be to identify all such manual tasks that are done on the systems and automate as many of them as possible. The reason for doing this is that it reduces the amount of manual work which can be of great help. The developers’ time is freed up to do some creative work. It also helps the developer to not get annoyed of doing manual tasks frequently. But the most important advantage is that it reduces the risk of errors that can occur in the task, especially if it is a critical task.
Agile Software Development!
It is becoming quite common these days to use Agile development methods to release software to clients and customers. Although Agile helps the development process by providing incremental version of the software, which gives an understanding to both the developers and the clients about how the solution or the product is evolving, it can create numerous problems in case if not managed properly. Agile is designed to be flexible to changes and allow teams to adapt to changes in the requirements as the product evolves. This can have an adverse effect as the clients can demand for changes that can offset the delivery timelines by a huge margin. To avoid such hassles and to keep the product delivery expectations realistic, the requirements should be documented clearly and shared with the clients at the start of the project. The entire development cycle that includes requirement gathering, design, development, testing, Q&A, client acceptance etc should be traceable. Traceable means at each step in the cycle, every step and activity can be revisited to know what happened at that stage. This can help locate issues at the root of the project before the final deployment.
The views given above are common practices followed by most teams but the main reason to revisit them is to look at the practices through the above perspectives. I hope this helps you and your teams increase your productivity and accountability while allowing you to continuously improve the current team culture. We, at Inventrom, do practice these methods religiously without fail at the defined time. And with experience I say this, these methods have really improved our growth.
Do let me know if you have interesting feedback or if there are some interesting practices you follow in your teams!
Your Future depends on what you do today!
