Software Development
9 minutes reading time
A few years ago, growth was about hiring more people. Today, growth is about efficiency—doing more with less. As an Engineering Leader, you must align your teams to achieve business goals while improving efficiency. Not every organization has the luxury of hiring more people, so what do we do? We capture each source of inefficiency and thrive on removing them.
After working with several organizations over the years, we have noticed common pitfalls that slow teams down. More importantly, we prepared a list of recommendations to avoid them.
Quality Control is Long Due to a Lack of Automation
Quality assurance and quality control are different. Quality assurance introduces quality into your process, while quality control verifies the product. When you lack test automation, it creates a more significant necessity for quality control after development, thus increasing the time to bring a change to the market. The lack of mock of external systems establishes a need to test in an integrated environment, leading to dependencies between teams, increased errors and increased time to market. Not to mention, when another team corrupts the environment, nobody can test and deploy in production anymore.
How to Spot The Trend?
When your deployment time is long, i.e., the time between when a pull request is merged and when it’s deployed in production, it’s a sign that you have many control gates or environments to go through. Elite teams have a Lead Time for Changes under 24 hours, so if you have several days in deployment time, it could indicate that you lack automation.
Solution
It’s time to focus on shift left testing. There are a few things you can work on:
- Bring in QAs at the start of the development cycle. Have them work with product folks and developers to consider how to test the system. Read about The Three Amigos.
- Try Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) to create test scenarios and automate them later. This will reduce the need to test everything manually.
- Improve mocking and contract testing between systems to reduce the need for end-to-end testing in an integrated environment—not necessarily eliminate it, but reduce the need. Advocate for the test pyramid idea.
How to Get Started
The first step is to start measuring yourself. The first set of metrics I suggest gathering is the DORA metrics. This will give you a first picture of the team’s delivery performance and let you know which teams need more attention from the pack.
Setting up Your DORA Metrics Dashboard
Tools such as Axify integrate seamlessly with your tech stack to collect accurate data at all phases of development. Our DORA metrics dashboard tracks Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate and Failed Deployment Recovery Time. It allows teams to compare their performance with industry benchmarks, past performance, and other teams in the same organization to identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes.
Comparing Your Teams’ Delivery Performance
Our teams’ insights allow you to visualize DORA metrics for each team. They offer the advantage of comparing apples to apples on two important engineering efficiency factors: speed and stability. You can quickly see which team could benefit from more attention and which could share their best practices for better performance.
Working Toward Continuous Improvement
Transform how your team sets and achieves goals with our objective and key results tracking tool. See immediately the evolution of your performance indicators and implement initiatives that support the continuous improvement of your development team.
Contact us for more information on how Axify helps development teams measure DORA KPIs and improve engineering efficiency, or request a demo.
More Pitfalls to Avoid For Maximum Software Engineering Efficiency
- Pull requests are stuck or taking too long to review
- Working items are too big
- Bad allocation of time investment
- Working on too many items at once
Or download our complete guide 👇