The time-quality ratio is one of the most important factors that determine your software development company’s success in the competitive market. However, you don’t want to reach a high ratio by constantly keeping your team in an overwhelmed state. That’s where the following development flexibility practices come in extremely handy.
1. Workflow Automation
Although there’s no way to automate the code creation process yet, you still can automate the following tasks:
- Testing – automated software testing is an excellent way to use the time needed for manual testing on new feature development and release. Fortunately, a wide selection of services can help your team to automate the testing process. Manual testing on different platforms and digital environments (such as browsers) takes too much time and slows down feature delivery. The quality of manual testing isn’t much higher than automated testing quality and lets your team improve features when they are already providing value to the users.
- CI/CD pipeline – the integration of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) will encourage your team to update the main code repository multiple times a day. This will simplify testing, eliminate technical debt, and allow fast iteration.
2. Agile Software Development
The Agile approach to project management involves splitting the workflow into sequences of small tasks to establish faster value delivery with fewer ongoing issues. This approach also allows to speed up the development process and reduce expenses at the same time. Besides, the whole process becomes transparent for the client and lets your team implement unpredicted changes with lower resource wasting.
The main principles of the Agile methodology include:
- precedence of human interactions over the technical process;
- a clear understanding of the client’s needs and focus on cooperation instead of contract negotiations;
- precedence of the ability to make ongoing adjustments over the integrity of the original plan.
- primary focus on the software, not on documentation.
3. Advanced Communication
The communication system in your company is one of the most important flexibility factors. Here are the ways to improve it:
- use dashboards for real-time communication and instant updates on the current tasks;
- duplicate important verbal messages in written form to organize thoughts better and ensure that all the info is 100% clear to all the team members;
- organize regular meetings to discuss all the latest accomplishments verbally and keep all the team members involved in the dynamic process.
4. Focus Shifting
Due to the dynamically changing software business, your team will regularly bump into unpredictably changing priorities. That’s where the readiness to shift focus is very important. The right approach to project management and incremental releasing will help you keep the entire team ready to instantly change the path of development to reach ongoing goals effectively without losing the average productivity rate.
Excel!
Integration of the described flexibility practices will introduce an almost instant positive change in your team’s development process. The long-term benefits will be impossible to underestimate due to reduced technical debt, increased average revenue, and significantly lower burnout rates.
