In today’s environment, it’s really tough to stay productive individually or in a team all the time.

When equipped with software projects, new clients with no defined plans or actions get stuck and seek for help to eliminate failures.

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But what is the cause behind this? Does it lie in poor management? Or maybe their team is not working properly.

Well, there can be many obstacles behind this, which is why we have listed some amazing solutions for you in this post to help you significantly improve your developers’ productivity.

There are many ways to increase development speed without increasing the number of employees or the number of hours in the workday.

The first and foremost step is to set goals for your project. In addition, to achieve goals, the quality of work is very important. It is measured by completing the project’s deadlines, budget and executing the necessary features.

Although, when development is in progress, achieving quality excellence tends to get really confusing. The reason is because of multiple factors that affect your ability to perform well.

Let’s discuss these factors in detail.

Factors that determine the success of a software development project

To certify software project success, you need to understand why the majority of software projects fail.

Here are some key factors that will ensure software project success:

Have a plan

With proper planning, everyone knows exactly what they are accountable for throughout the project.

So, before you start working, plan the project strategy and approach that will lead you to reach the end goal. Take the time to understand which development tools you’ll be using during the process and identify the technical design that will support your software.

Make sure you have all of the following:

  • Plans with clear objectives
  • Application outline
  • Code reviews
  • Automated testing
  • Bug and task tracking

Appoint experienced developers

Appointing skilled developers makes for an easy development process. Dealing with senior developers will surely cost more, but it will save you headaches, time, and money in the long run.

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Just make sure that every team member knows their roles and tasks for the project.

Assigning project roles will assure you that the team can complete the project efficiently.

Also, it is important to make sure that the team is following the software development process and protocols.

The project which doesn’t have a good design and development process can certainly fail in the future.

Moreover, work with a team that is excited about the project and truly cares about the result of your project.

Have good communication

Good and clear communication is necessary for a project.

As a client, clear vision and communication about your product is important.

Therefore, make sure to communicate with your development team in such a way that they build exactly what you have asked for.

Good communication will amplify your chances of creating a successful software project.

Execute risk management

You have to be always prepared before things go wrong, so try to fail as elegantly as possible.

One way to do this is to create a risk record with action plans to ease and handle risks early on in the process.

The software development team should create a plan to tackle risks and inform clients about possible troubles.

Classify any risks that might come and then examine the impact it might have on your overall project finances, capacity, and quality. Execute the proper risk management to lessen any risks crashing your project.

Common challenges that affect the success of a software project

There are lots of challenges that might affect the success of an IT project. Some are even not in the control of the software development team.

Let’s see a few examples:

Lack of clarity

One of the obstacles to project performance is a lack of clarity. Sometimes employees don’t recognize the project goals, purposes, tasks, and responsibilities, etc.

They don’t relate their individual goals to the goals of other team members, and to the project. Employers also sometimes don’t know what they have to achieve if the project plans aren’t clear.

Extremely high competition

Nowadays, the competition is enormously high both at the local and international levels, and it largely affects the software businesses in terms of pricing, customer reach, etc.

Therefore, you have to work closely with stakeholders to recognize the right market section and ensure the ROI of the software.

Insufficient resources

Let’s assume that you’ve considered and planned for project development and overall costs, but what happens after rollout?

What does it take to effectively inform, or educate, the customer?

Did you properly mark marketing, customer support, and maintenance needs?

You need to consider all of these things if you want your project to succeed.

Resistance to change

Sometimes you experience delays in your project due to constant changes.

Keep in mind that even a small change in performance may result in extra hours of structuring and testing.

So, you need to make sure that the number of changes require during your project development are minimal, so that you can easily achieve your desired goals with your project.

5 Productivity metrics to measure the productivity of your software development team

Measuring a development team’s productivity is one of the most tricky challenges that software managers currently face.

That’s why we have listed the following five developer metrics which are essential to measure the productivity of your team.

Sprint Burn-down reports

A Sprint is a planned unit of time during which developers have planned tasks to complete in time.

Sprint length is usually between one and four weeks. And at the start of each Sprint, developers summarize the tasks they think they’ll be able to complete during the period.

As the Sprint ends, they report whether tasks are to be started, unfinished, or complete.

By following these end burndown reports, you’ll be able to clearly see if your team has achieved their productivity goals.

However, this metric can be false if you aren’t cautious. If your team has set low goals for themselves, reporting tasks complete when they’re ‘’actually not’’ then the accuracy of this metric for productivity purposes is untrustworthy.

Velocity

Story points are an individual measurement used within a development team to measure the difficulty of completing a particular user story.

From this task, developers can get requirements for the software and can guess how complex the task.

However, every person’s velocity metric is unique and should not be used to compare with another person.

For instance, one person may finish the work in five hours, whereas it may take another developer nine hours.

The actual hours taken can depend on a lot of knowledge, ability, and enthusiasm. On the other hand, it can also depend on devotion to best practices, code quality, and testing.

This is why we can never detect from a story time-tracking metric alone which developer is more fruitful.

Cycle times

How much time do issues take to resolve?

That’s especially what the cycle time metric looks at. As a person’s issue rises, you can track how fast each s resolved, as well as see when many issues arise at once, whether teams are skilled at handling them at a good rate or whether they get scared.

Teams that constantly fix issues within a logical timeframe, and don’t get scared when many issues arise at once can be trusted to work always well.

Another issue tracking technique is picturing all issues over time: outstanding, in progress, and completed.

If you have an uneven number of issues left in outstanding, or in progress, then these can quickly stack up and exceed the issues that have been fixed.

To address this, there may be times when new work needs to be resumed to remove the excess of outstanding issues. Don’t think of this as an annoyance or setback, it’s a need to keep a project on track.

Throughput

Your team’s throughput is similar to its velocity, only more roughly.

While velocity checks the end result, throughput counts tasks and errors in addition to features.

So while velocity informs you what your team did that can actually be sold, throughput gives you a better idea of what their overall workload was for given time periods.

Open pull requests

When your developers complete a change request, they’ll add it to the code depot and then issue a pull request that asks the rest of the team to re-examine the work.

Each pull request will remain open until colleagues have offered feedback and a manager marks it as closed.

Having a lot of open pull requests shows that a lot of work is getting done — but it could also be a sign that your reviewers are sluggish in responding.

So, there you have it!

Now that you know what metrics to track to measure your development team’s productivity, let’s move forward and see how can you improve their productivity and effectiveness to achieve better results.

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4 Ways to improve productivity & effectiveness of your software development team

Taking some small yet effective steps can help optimize your for higher efficiency and better results.

Create a productive environment

It might not just be your team that needs progress; it might be the environment around them that’s letting them down.

One of the main roles of the software development team manager should be to protect and guard the team against other things occurring in the business, to allow them to do their best work.

Your devoted software development team should have plenty of space to work together in a large room rather than being split into individual cubicles or offices.

This format has been shown to increase efficiency and creativity in your software development.

It can also be useful to separate your software development team from the rest of the business to help them concentrate while providing them with the comfort of refreshments and fuel so that they don’t have to leave the office frequently to recharge and boost energy levels.

Support your team

A software development team needs just the right amount of support to succeed.

Without sufficient support, your devoted software development team can lose direction and force.

However, with too much control and ruling over, the creativity and efficiency of your team will be decreased.

So, support your team by being clear with expectations and goals by providing a project manager to guide and direct them. And at the same time, you must also give your team enough liberty and space to allow them to make their best work.

Boost expertise

A great way to improve the effectiveness and productivity of your software development team is to offer employees a chance to take on a new task or increased responsibilities.

You can even offer to support team members to proceed with their skills and learn new techniques.

Offering development prospects provides your team with the necessary new skills they might need to grow while also giving your employees the signal that they can have growth in your company.

Define your workflow

While it sounds obvious, it’s surprising how many offices function without a workflow.

It is most important to maintain a workflow to promote teamwork and efficiency.

A smooth workflow helps to give every member of the team clear tasks and goals to complete while also removing needless tasks and interruptions.

Physically planning out your workflow on a board that is noticeable to the whole team helps the team maintain focus and increases the results for an enthusiastic software development team.

Summing Up

Today’s enterprise environments are extremely unstable, doubtful, complex, and vague.

Therefore, it is extremely important to keep all the above-mentioned factors in mind while scoring the productivity of your company.

You can also empower your teams to be more productive by laying constant ways for productive results.

By using all the above factors, you can clearly increase your developer’s productivity.

We hope you enjoy reading this article to make your teams more creative and efficient.

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author-profile

Krutika Khakhkhar

Krutika is an accomplished software project manager with years of experience leading complex software development projects from conception to delivery. She possesses an unique combination of technical and project management skills, which enables her to successfully manage and motivate cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality software solutions.

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