Uncategorized How to Speed Up Development Processes – ARC
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This guide introduces shift-left testing and its benefits. Learn to increase your SDLC velocity and minimize bugs at release by shifting testing left.
Every company wants to deliver great products with high quality to their customers. At the same time, the company must develop and deliver the product faster without losing quality. Therefore, companies — and especially product managers — always try to optimize the software development process to get faster without losing the quality of the product and get ahead of their competitors.
These four aspects are essential to help you accelerate the speed of your development processes:
The basis for every company and software development team must be a product strategy. With the strategy in-place, a team can derive their own necessary steps from the overall strategic framework that will help speed up the product’s development.
As a first step, a company or team must identify the market and the target audience it will develop the product for. If this knowledge is available, it’s much easier to focus on the customers’ needs and get into the details.
Based on the target audience, a development team and especially the product manager, in collaboration with UX/UI colleagues, can start with an early prototyping.
The company can share these early prototypes with target customers to get first insights about the potential of the new product. This early user involvement will help the team again to focus on the features that really matter to the customers.
If the company strategy is clear, the biggest process improvements can be done within the software development team. If a team uses Agile methodologies such as SCRUM or KANBAN, it can establish a lean way of working, even if the company around the team is not as agile.
The most important thing for a team is to focus. If the development and product focus has a clear vision and mission, a team can achieve amazing things. Here are four ways to become more agile and speed up processes:
Another thing to improve within a software development team is automation. This is clearly not a product manager’s task. However, a product manager must know the benefits of automation and support the team in investing time in their own infrastructure, which helps the team to build products.
Once automation is in place, whether they’re automated checks to verify code changes or scripts to package the product and distribute it within the organization, it will save the team time. The team can use this saved time to get more involved into the product discovery or work on the overall technical architecture of the product. If done right, automation will significantly speed up the development and delivery process.
However, before a team starts to invest time and money into automation, the team must have a good understanding of what should be automated and what not. For example, if parts of the product will change more frequently in the next weeks, it’s maybe not a good idea to start automating this part too early. On the other side, if there are critical parts of the application that must always be up and running it’s important to cover these parts with automation from the beginning. The decision which part should be automated when and how should be made within the team.
Every product should be documented, including how the product has been developed. What are the supported features, where are potential problems or what to come in the future? Sounds like an easy task, but most teams did not invest enough time in documenting their own products and services. However, this invested time will help again to speed up the development process in the long run. Especially if a product is growing and is getting older, this kind of information will help the team to remember decisions or the product architecture.
Furthermore, a solid product documentation will help to onboard new colleagues to the team. They can invest some time to read through it and can understand dependencies and the logic of the product much faster. This will help the team to bring new colleagues up to speed faster. Last but not least a well documented product will also help stakeholders to get more knowledge about the product without asking and interrupting the team. Depending on the company IT infrastructure, the product documentation can be made within a ticketing system, a wiki or even in the code itself.
Companies should concentrate on reducing the time to market of their products. They must be fast enough to serve the needs of their users and to stay ahead of the competition. However, the development speed doesn’t come for free. A team should invest time to analyze the current way of working. To improve the development process, get answers to the following questions to speed things up:
