In today's dynamic software development perspective, achieving success relies on more than just coding expertise. It's about understanding and optimizing every phase of the development lifecycle. While optimizing the development cycle may be considered a simple task, it requires constant visibility of every action taken in the development and deployment phases. The idea is that you cannot improve what you cannot measure.
Monitoring the actions and measuring their impact on the organization are crucial points to identify the areas that are open to improvement and enable teams to take action correcting mistakes, preventing delays, and utilizing efficient collaboration between each contributing party.
In this blog, we aim to explore how increased visibility across various metrics translates into significant advantages for your development teams and how Valven Atlas can enable even the best teams to improve their development cycle.
Empowering Code Quality and Efficiency
Efficiency in the development cycle can be directly associated with performance in the coding phase, developer well-being, collaboration details, time and effort in analysis, review, testing, and deployment steps, development behaviors, and code quality.
With Valven Atlas, monitoring written code becomes a transparent process. The increased visibility into written code quality not only identifies potential issues early but also streamlines review or testing delays leading to fostering a more efficient development cycle. Teams gain the ability to collaborate seamlessly by identifying any bottlenecks, ensuring that the code and flow meet high standards, and reducing the chances of delays caused by rework.
Leveraging DORA Metrics for Informed Decision-Making
Tracking DORA metrics can both point out any issues in the deployment phase and set a target for teams to achieve elite performance on deploying new product updates or completing projects.
DORA metrics can also highlight faulty releases that lead to additional effort and resources to fix and have the potential to impact customer experience causing profit loss. Therefore, it is wise to keep track of the metrics, measure the effort in fixing these faulty releases, and take action to prevent repeating the same mistakes in the future.
To achieve these and have a more solid and functioning release cycle, Valven Atlas offers more than just collecting data; it empowers teams with actionable insights from DORA Metrics. By increasing visibility into metrics like deployment frequency, change failure rate, and lead time for changes, teams can make data-driven decisions, enhance team collaboration, and optimize their development processes for greater efficiency while avoiding any undesired consequences.
Optimizing Project Timelines
Increased visibility into projects and teams separately enables team leads and managers to have better alignment with project timelines. Constantly tracking each team and project separately will lead to analyzing the needs in a data-driven fashion and addressing the needs for each project and team respectively.
The teams using the agile model should also track their sprints constantly to understand if there are any issues or delays related to their timeline so that they can take necessary actions to modify the sprint scope or communicate with the right contacts.
Valven Atlas enables teams to precisely track resource planning in each work type, team, project, and sprint ensuring that the right execution of the resources is always in place. This proactive approach helps prevent delays and improves project planning.
Additionally, improved visibility facilitates efficient sprint planning by providing real-time insights into team progress and potential issues.
Effective Resource Distribution
In software development companies one of the most important entities that needs to be managed efficiently is the company resource. Every action and decision is shaped based on the resources that the organization has.
Even if the decisions are based correctly on the resources, the execution may not be always what was expected by the management because of daily operations, unexpected issues, and individual-related or product-related emergencies.
Valven Atlas breaks down the resource distribution for each team, project, or issue type based on maintenance, improvement, recovery, and support to reflect the path the company is taking. This comprehensive analysis of the distribution enables management to check if the company is planning its resources and executing the established plan correctly.
Ensuring A Healthy Development Cycle
Developer burnout may be one of the biggest issues for a software development company. Poor planning, issues in resource allocation, and changing requirements may put pressure on the developers which causes burnout and inefficiency in their work.
Additionally, serious peaks in the bugs and issues can be a result of a lack of adopting the best practices and can be a signal that the developers may not be paying attention or their workload prevents them from spending enough time.
By providing clear visibility into bug counts and potential bottlenecks, Valven Atlas helps mitigate issues before they escalate. Developers gain the support needed to address challenges promptly, reducing the risk of burnout and enhancing team efficiency.
Constant and historical analysis of the number of bugs and issues on every project or sprint enables teams to take measures to eliminate risks in the development cycle with minimum cost.
Enforcing The Best Practices
It can be a challenging and time-consuming task to always be on top of the actions taken or not taken by each individual or team in every project. However, the monitoring should be actively carried out to ensure everything is under control and the teams are working most efficiently.
There should be additional mechanisms to achieve constant monitoring such as automated alerts to guarantee if any inefficiencies occur, the responsible contacts should get a notification to check the main reasons and take action accordingly. While these actions can lead to establishing the most efficient practices, they can also ensure that new additions to the teams will adopt the practices swiftly.
Valven Atlas offers workflow automation for all related entities in the development cycle. This approach takes valuable data from the analysis, design, coding, review, test, and deployment phases and turns them into actionable insights by notifying the team leaders related to any unexpected actions in the development lifecycle. In this way, new team members can adopt the practices applied in the company so that a solid company culture can be established with minimum operational cost.
Valven Atlas workflow automation generates alerts, ensuring that risky commits are handled properly, pull request approvals are addressed promptly, issues do not stay open for a long time, testing actions are finalized on time, and more. This proactive approach streamlines workflows and prevents potential delays every step of the way.
Data-Driven Engineering Assistant Into Software Development Visibility
Valven Atlas is more than a tool that only offers insights into your development flow; it's a catalyst for transforming the way development organizations operate. By offering increased visibility for development metrics, Valven Atlas empowers teams to optimize their processes, enhance collaboration, and drive continuous improvement.
Take your development and deployment cycles to the next level with Valven Atlas and witness the transformative power of heightened visibility in your software development journey.
Contact us at atlas@valven.com to discuss how we can help you increase your visibility in every detail of the cycle and take the best approaches to become an elite software development organization.