In today's fast-paced and rapidly evolving software development landscape, effective project management is crucial for engineering teams striving to meet deadlines, deliver quality products, and maintain customer satisfaction. Project management not only ensures that tasks are completed on time but also optimizes resource allocation enhances team collaboration, and improves communication across all stakeholders. A key tool that has gained prominence in this domain is JIRA, which is widely recognized for its robust features tailored for agile project management.
However, while JIRA offers numerous advantages, such as customizable workflows, detailed reporting, and integration capabilities with other tools, it also comes with limitations that can hinder its effectiveness. For instance, teams relying solely on JIRA dashboard gadget may find themselves missing critical contextual data from the development process. They may obtain a snapshot of project statuses but fail to appreciate the underlying issues impacting progress. Understanding both the strengths and weaknesses of JIRA dashboard gadget is vital for engineering managers to make informed decisions about their project management strategies.
JIRA dashboard gadgets primarily focus on issue tracking and project management, often missing critical contextual data from the development process. While JIRA can show the status of tasks and issues, it does not provide insights into the actual code changes, commits, or branch activities that contribute to those tasks. This lack of context can lead to misunderstandings about project progress and team performance. For example, a task may be marked as "in progress," but without visibility into the associated Git commits, managers may not know if the team is encountering blockers or if significant progress has been made. This disconnect can result in misaligned expectations and hinder effective decision-making.
JIRA dashboards having road map gadget or sprint burndown gadget can sometimes present a static view of project progress, which may not reflect real-time changes in the development process. For instance, while a JIRA road map gadget or sprint burndown gadget may indicate that a task is "done," it does not account for any recent changes or updates made in the codebase. This static nature can hinder proactive decision-making, as managers may not have access to the most current information about the project's health. Additionally, relying on historical data can create a lag in response to emerging issues in issue statistics gadget. In a rapidly changing development environment, the ability to react quickly to new information is crucial for maintaining project momentum hence we need to move beyond default chart gadget like road map gadget or burndown chart gadget.
Collaboration is essential in software development, yet JIRA dashboards often do not capture the collaborative efforts of the team. Metrics such as code reviews, pull requests, and team discussions are crucial for understanding how well the team is working together. Without this information, managers may overlook opportunities for improvement in team dynamics and communication. For example, if a team is actively engaged in code reviews but this activity is not reflected in JIRA gadgets or sprint burndown gadget, managers may mistakenly assume that collaboration is lacking. This oversight can lead to missed opportunities to foster a more cohesive team environment and improve overall productivity.
JIRA dashboard or other copy dashboard can sometimes encourage a focus on individual performance metrics rather than team outcomes. This can foster an environment of unhealthy competition, where developers prioritize personal achievements over collaborative success. Such an approach can undermine team cohesion and lead to burnout. When individual metrics are emphasized, developers may feel pressured to complete tasks quickly, potentially sacrificing code quality and collaboration. This focus on personal performance can create a culture where teamwork and knowledge sharing are undervalued, ultimately hindering project success.
JIRA dashboard layout often rely on predefined metrics and reports, which may not align with the unique needs of every project or team. This inflexibility can result in a lack of relevant insights that are critical for effective project management. For example, a team working on a highly innovative project may require different metrics than a team maintaining legacy software. The inability to customize reports can lead to frustration and a sense of disconnect from the data being presented.
Integrating Git data with JIRA provides a more holistic view of project performance and developer productivity. Here’s how this integration can enhance insights:
By connecting Git repositories with JIRA, engineering managers can gain real-time visibility into commits, branches, and pull requests associated with JIRA issues & issue statistics. This integration allows teams to see the actual development work being done, providing context to the status of tasks on the JIRA dashboard gadet. For instance, if a developer submits a pull request that relates to a specific JIRA ticket, the project manager instantly knows that work is ongoing, fostering transparency. Additionally, automated notifications for changes in the codebase linked to JIRA issues keep everyone updated without having to dig through multiple tools. This integrated approach ensures that management has a clear understanding of actual progress rather than relying on static task statuses.
Integrating Git data with JIRA facilitates better collaboration among team members. Developers can reference JIRA issues in their commit messages, making it easier for the team to track changes related to specific tasks. This transparency fosters a culture of collaboration, as everyone can see how their work contributes to the overall project goals. Moreover, by having a clear link between code changes and JIRA issues, team members can engage in more meaningful discussions during stand-ups and retrospectives. This enhanced communication can lead to improved problem-solving and a stronger sense of shared ownership over the project.
With integrated Git and JIRA data, engineering managers can identify potential risks more effectively. By monitoring commit activity and pull requests alongside JIRA issue statuses, managers can spot trends and anomalies that may indicate project delays or technical challenges. For example, if there is a sudden decrease in commit activity for a specific task, it may signal that the team is facing challenges or blockers. This proactive approach allows teams to address issues before they escalate, ultimately improving project outcomes and reducing the likelihood of last-minute crises.
The combination of JIRA and Git data enables more comprehensive reporting and analytics. Engineering managers can analyze not only task completion rates but also the underlying development activity that drives those metrics. This deeper understanding can inform better decision-making and strategic planning for future projects. For instance, by analyzing commit patterns and pull request activity, managers can identify trends in team performance and areas for improvement. This data-driven approach allows for more informed resource allocation and project planning, ultimately leading to more successful outcomes.
To maximize the benefits of integrating Git data with JIRA, engineering managers should consider the following best practices:
Choose integration tools that fit your team's specific needs. Tools like Typo can facilitate the connection between Git and JIRA smoothly. Additionally, JIRA integrates directly with several source control systems, allowing for automatic updates and real-time visibility.
If you’re ready to enhance your project delivery speed and predictability, consider integrating Git data with your JIRA dashboards. Explore Typo! We can help you do this in a few clicks & make it one of your favorite dashboards.
Encourage your team to adopt consistent commit message guidelines. Including JIRA issue keys in commit messages will create a direct link between the code change and the JIRA issue. This practice not only enhances traceability but also aids in generating meaningful reports and insights. For example, a commit message like 'JIRA-123: Fixed the login issue' can help managers quickly identify relevant commits related to specific tasks.
Leverage automation features available in both JIRA and Git platforms to streamline the integration process. For instance, set up automated triggers that update JIRA issues based on events in Git, such as moving a JIRA issue to 'In Review' once a pull request is submitted in Git. This reduces manual updates and alleviates the administrative burden on the team.
Providing adequate training to your team ensures everyone understands the integration process and how to effectively use both tools together. Conduct workshops or create user guides that outline the key benefits of integrating Git and JIRA, along with tips on how to leverage their combined functionalities for improved workflows.
Implement regular check-ins to assess the effectiveness of the integration. Gather feedback from team members on how well the integration is functioning and identify any pain points. This ongoing feedback loop allows you to make incremental improvements, ensuring the integration continues to meet the needs of the team.
Create comprehensive dashboards that visually represent combined metrics from both Git and JIRA. Tools like JIRA dashboards, Confluence, or custom-built data visualization platforms can provide a clearer picture of project health. Metrics can include the number of active pull requests, average time in code review, or commit activity relevant to JIRA task completion.
With the changes being reflected in JIRA, create a culture around regular code reviews linked to specific JIRA tasks. This practice encourages collaboration among team members, ensures code quality, and keeps everyone aligned with project objectives. Regular code reviews also lead to knowledge sharing, which strengthens the team's overall skill set.
To illustrate the benefits of integrating Git data with JIRA, let’s consider a case study of a software development team at a company called Trackso.
Trackso, a remote monitoring platform for Solar energy, was developing a new SaaS platform that consisted of a diverse team of developers, designers, and project managers. The team relied heavily on JIRA for tracking project statuses, but they found their productivity hampered by several issues:
In 2022, Trackso's engineering manager decided to integrate Git data with JIRA. They chose GitHub for version control, given its robust collaborative features. The team set up automatic links between their JIRA tickets and corresponding GitHub pull requests and standardized their commit messages to include JIRA issue keys.
After implementing the integration, Trackso experienced significant improvements within three months:
Despite these successes, Trackso faced challenges during the integration process:
While JIRA dashboards are valuable tools for project management, they are insufficient on their own for engineering managers seeking to improve project delivery speed and predictability. By integrating Git data with JIRA, teams can gain richer insights into development activity, enhance collaboration, and manage risks more effectively. This holistic approach empowers engineering leaders to make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement in their software development processes. Embracing this integration will ultimately lead to better project outcomes and a more productive engineering culture. As the software development landscape continues to evolve, leveraging the power of both JIRA and Git data will be essential for teams looking to stay competitive and deliver high-quality products efficiently.
In an ever-changing tech landscape, organizations need to stay agile and deliver high-quality software rapidly. DevOps plays a crucial role in achieving these goals by bridging the gap between development and operations teams.
In this blog, we will delve into how to build a DevOps culture within your organization and explore the fundamental practices and strategies that can lead to more efficient, reliable, and customer-focused software development.
DevOps is a software development methodology that integrates development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to enhance software delivery’s speed, efficiency, and quality. The primary goal is to break down traditional silos between development and operations teams and foster a culture of collaboration and communication throughout the software development lifecycle. This creates a more efficient and agile workflow that allows organizations to respond quickly to changes and deliver value to customers faster.
DevOps culture refers to a collaborative and integrated approach between development and operations teams. It focuses on breaking down silos, fostering a shared sense of responsibility, and improving processes through automation and continuous feedback.
The CALMS framework is used to understand and implement DevOps principles effectively. It breaks down DevOps into five key components:
The culture pillar focuses on fostering a collaborative environment where shared responsibility and open communication are prioritized. It is crucial to break down silos between development and operations teams and allow them to work together more effectively.
Automation emphasizes minimizing manual intervention in processes. This includes automating testing, deployment, and infrastructure management to enhance efficiency and reliability.
The lean aspect aims to optimize workflows, manage work-in-progress (WIP), and eliminate non-value-adding activities. This is to streamline processes to accelerate software delivery and improve overall quality.
Measurement involves collecting data to assess the effectiveness of software delivery processes and practices. It enables teams to make informed, fact-based decisions, identify areas for improvement, and track progress.
The sharing component promotes open communication and knowledge transfer among teams It facilitates cross-team collaboration, fosters a learning environment, and ensures that successful practices and insights are shared and adopted widely.
Don’t overwhelm teams completely with the DevOps haul. Begin small and implement DevOps practice gradually. You can start first with the team that is better aligned with DevOps principles and then move ahead with other teams in the organization. Build momentum with early wins and evolve practices as you gain experience.
Communication is a key. When done correctly, it promotes collaboration and a smooth flow of information across the organization. This further aligns organization operations and lets the engineering leaders make informed decisions.
Moreover, the combined working environment between the development and operations teams promotes a culture of shared responsibility and common objectives. They can openly communicate ideas and challenges, allowing them to have a mutual conversation about resources, schedules, required features, and execution of projects.
Apart from encouraging communication and a collaborative environment, create a clear plan that outlines where you want to go and how you will get there. Ensure that these goals are realistic and achievable. This will allow teams to see the bigger picture and understand the desired outcome, motivating them to move in the right direction.
Tools such as Slack, Kubernetes, Docker, and Jfrog help build automation capabilities for DevOps teams. These tools are useful as they automate repetitive and mundane tasks and allow teams to focus on value-adding work. This allows them to fail fast, build fast, and deliver quickly which enhances their efficiency and process acceleration, positively impacting DevOps culture. Ensure that instead of assuming, ask your team directly what part can be automated and further support facilities to automate it.
The organization must fully understand and implement CI/CD to establish a DevOps culture and streamline the software delivery process. This allows for automating deployment from development to production and releasing the software more frequently with better quality and reduced risks. The CI/CD tools further allow teams to catch bugs early in the development cycle, reduce manual work, and minimize downtime between releases.
Continuous improvement is a key principle of DevOps culture. Engineering leaders must look for ways to encourage continuous learning and improvement such as by training and providing upskilling opportunities. Besides this, give them the freedom to experiment with new tools and techniques. Create a culture where they feel comfortable making mistakes and learning from them.
The teams must ensure that delivering products quickly doesn’t mean compromising security. In DevOps culture, the organization must adopt a ‘Security-first approach’ by integrating security practices into the DevOps pipeline. To maintain a strong security posture, regular security audits and compliance checks are essential. Security scans should be conducted at every stage of the development lifecycle to continuously monitor and assess security.
Regularly monitor and track system performance to detect issues early and ensure smooth operation. Use metrics and data to guide decisions, optimize processes, and continuously improve DevOps practices. Implement comprehensive dashboards and alerts to ensure teams can quickly respond to performance issues and maintain optimal health.
In DevOps culture, the organization must emphasize the ever-evolving needs of the customers. Encourage teams to think from the customer’s perspective and keep their needs and satisfaction at the forefront of the software delivery processes. Regularly incorporate customer feedback into the development cycle to ensure the product aligns with user expectations.
Typo is an effective software engineering intelligence platform that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through DORA and other key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Typo has an effective sprint analysis feature that tracks and analyzes the team’s progress throughout a sprint. Besides this, It also provides 360 views of the developer experience i.e. captures qualitative insights and provides an in-depth view of the real issues.
Building a DevOps culture is essential for organizations to improve their software delivery capabilities and maintain a competitive edge. Implementing key practices as mentioned above will pave the way for a successful DevOps transformation.
As platform engineering continues to evolve, it brings both promising opportunities and potential challenges.
As we look to the future, what changes lie ahead for Platform Engineering? In this blog, we will explore the future landscape of platform engineering and strategize how organizations can stay at the forefront of innovation.
Platform Engineering is an emerging technology approach that enables software developers with all the required resources. It acts as a bridge between development and infrastructure which helps in simplifying the complex tasks and enhancing development velocity. The primary goal is to improve developer experience, operational efficiency, and the overall speed of software delivery.
The rise in Platform Engineering will enhance developer experience by creating standard toolchains and workflow. In the coming time, the platform engineering team will work closely with developers to understand what they need to be productive. Moreover, the platform tool will be integrated and closely monitored through DevEx and reports. This will enable developers to work efficiently and focus on the core tasks by automating repetitive tasks, further improving their productivity and satisfaction.
Platform engineering is closely associated with the development of IDP. In today’s times, organizations are striving for efficiency, hence, the creation and adoption of internal development platforms will rise. This will streamline operations, provide a standardized way of deploying and managing applications, and reduce cognitive load. Hence, reducing time to market for new features and products, allowing developers to focus on delivering high-quality products more efficiently rather than managing infrastructure.
Modern software development demands rapid iteration. The ephemeral environments, temporary, ideal environments, will be an effective way to test new features and bugs before they are merged into the main codebase. These environments will prioritize speed, flexibility, and cost efficiency. Since they are created on-demand and short-lived, they will align perfectly with modern development practices.
As times are changing, AI-driven tools become more prevalent. These Generative AI tools such as GitHub Copilot and Google Gemini will enhance capabilities such as infrastructure as code, governance as code, and security as code. This will not only automate manual tasks but also support smoother operations and improved documentation processes. Hence, driving innovation and automating dev workflow.
Platform engineering is a natural extension of DevOps. In the future, the platform engineers will work alongside DevOps rather than replacing it to address its complexities and scalability challenges. This will provide a standardized and automated approach to software development and deployment leading to faster project initialization, reduced lead time, and increased productivity.
Software organizations are now shifting from project project-centric model towards product product-centric funding model. When platforms are fully-fledged products, they serve internal customers and require a thoughtful and user-centric approach in their ongoing development. It also aligns well with the product lifecycle that is ongoing and continuous which enhances innovation and reduces operational friction. It will also decentralize decision making which allows platform engineering leaders to make and adjust funding decisions for their teams.
Typo is an effective software engineering intelligence platform that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Typo has an effective sprint analysis feature that tracks and analyzes the team’s progress throughout a sprint. Besides this, It also provides 360 views of the developer experience i.e. captures qualitative insights and provides an in-depth view of the real issues.
The future of platform engineering is both exciting and dynamic. As this field continues to evolve, staying ahead of these developments is crucial for organizations aiming to maintain a competitive edge. By embracing these predictions and proactively adapting to changes, platform engineering teams can drive innovation, improve efficiency, and deliver high-quality products that meet the demands of an ever-changing tech landscape.
Platform engineering is a relatively new and evolving field in the tech industry. However, like any evolving field, it comes with its share of challenges. If overlooked can limit its effectiveness.
In this blog post, we dive deep into these common missteps and provide actionable insights to overcome them, so that your platform engineering efforts are both successful and sustainable.
Platform Engineering refers to providing foundational tools and services to the development team that allow them to quickly and safely deliver their applications. This aims to increase developer productivity by providing a unified technical platform to streamline the process which helps reduce errors and enhance reliability.
The core component of Platform Engineering is IDP i.e. centralized collections of tools, services, and automated workflows that enable developers to self-serve resources needed for building, testing, and deploying applications. It empowers developers to deliver faster by reducing reliance on other teams, automating repetitive tasks, reducing the risk of errors, and ensuring every application adheres to organizational standards.
The platform team consists of platform engineers who are responsible for building, maintaining, and configuring the IDP. The platform team standardizes workflows, automates repetitive tasks, and ensures that developers have access to the necessary tools and resources. The aim is to create a seamless experience for developers. Hence, allowing them to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure.
Platform engineering focuses on the importance of standardizing processes and automating infrastructure management. This includes creating paved roads for common development tasks such as deployment scripts, testing, and scaling to simplify workflows and reduce friction for developers. Curating a catalog of resources, following predefined templates, and establishing best practices ensure that every deployment follows the same standards, thus enhancing consistency across development efforts while allowing flexibility for individual preferences.
Platform engineering is an iterative process, requiring ongoing assessment and enhancement based on developer feedback and changing business needs. This results in continuous improvement that ensures the platform evolves to meet the demands of its users and incorporates new technologies and practices as they emerge.
Security is a key component of platform engineering. Integrating security best practices into the platform such as automated vulnerability scanning, encryption, and compliance monitoring is the best way to protect against vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. This proactive approach is integrated into all stages of the platform helps mitigate risks associated with software delivery and fosters a secure development environment.
One of the common mistakes platform engineers make is focusing solely on dashboards without addressing the underlying issues that need solving. While dashboards provide a good overview, they can lead to a superficial understanding of problems instead of encouraging genuine process improvements.
To avoid this, teams must combine dashboards with automated alerts, tracing, and log analysis to get actionable insights and a more comprehensive observability strategy for faster incident detection and resolution.
Developing a platform based on assumptions ends up not addressing real problems and does not meet the developers’s needs. The platform may lack important features for developers leading to dissatisfaction and low adoption.
Hence, establishing clear objectives and success criteria vital for guiding development efforts. Engage with developers now and then. Conduct surveys, interviews, or workshops to gather insights into their pain points and needs before building the platform.
Building an overlay complex platform hinders rather than helps development efforts. When the platform contains features that aren’t necessary or used by developers, it leads to increased maintenance costs and confusion among developers that further hampers their productivity.
The goal must be finding the right balance between functionality and simplicity. Hence, ensuring the platform effectively meets the needs of developers without unnecessary complications and iterating it based on actual usage and feedback.
The belief that a single platform caters to all development teams and uses cases uniformly is a fallacy. Different teams and applications have varying needs, workflows, and technology stacks, necessitating tailored solutions rather than a uniform approach. As a result, the platform may end up being too rigid for some teams and overly complex for some resulting in low adoption and inefficiencies.
Hence, design a flexible and customizable platform that adapts to diverse requirements. This allows teams to tailor the platform to their specific workflows while maintaining shared standards and governance.
Spending excessive time in the planning phase leads to delays in implementation, missed opportunities, and not fully meeting the evolving needs of end-users. When the teams focus on perfecting every detail before implementation it results in the platform remaining theoretical instead of delivering real value.
An effective way is to create a balance between planning and executing by adopting an iterative approach. In other words, focus on delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly and continuously improving it based on real user feedback. This allows the platform to evolve in alignment with actual developer needs which ensures better adoption and more effective outcomes.
Building the platform without incorporating security measures from the beginning can create opportunities for cyber threats and attacks. This also exposes the organization to compliance risks, vulnerabilities, and potential breaches that could be costly to resolve.
Implementing automated security tools, such as identity and access management (IAM), encrypted communications, and code analysis tools helps continuously monitor for security issues and ensure compliance with best practices. Besides this, provide ongoing security training that covers common vulnerabilities, secure coding practices, and awareness of evolving threats.
When used correctly, platform engineering offers many benefits:
Typo is an effective platform engineering tool that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Typo has an effective sprint analysis feature that tracks and analyzes the team’s progress throughout a sprint. Besides this, It also provides 360 views of the developer experience i.e. captures qualitative insights and provides an in-depth view of the real issues.
Platform engineering has immense potential to streamline development and improve efficiency, but avoiding common pitfalls is key. By focusing on the pitfalls mentioned above, you can create a platform that drives productivity and innovation.
All the best! :)
Robert C. Martin introduced the ‘Clean Code’ concept in his book ‘Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship’. He defined clean code as:
“A code that has been taken care of. Someone has taken the time to keep it simple and orderly. They have laid appropriate attention to details. They have cared.”
Clean code is easy to read, understand, and maintain. It is well structured and free of unnecessary complexity, code smell, and anti-patterns.
This principle states that each module or function should have a defined responsibility and one reason to change. Otherwise, it can result in bloated and hard-to-maintain code.
Example: the code’s responsibilities are separated into three distinct classes: User, Authentication, and EmailService. This makes the code more modular, easier to test, and easier to maintain.
class User {
constructor(name, email, password) {
this.name = name;
this.email = email;
this.password = password;
}
}
class Authentication {
login(user, password) {
// ... login logic
}
register(user, password) {
// ... registration logic
}
}
class EmailService {
sendVerificationEmail(email) {
// ... email sending logic
}
}
The DRY Principle states that unnecessary duplication and repetition of code must be avoided. If not followed, it can increase the risk of inconsistency and redundancy. Instead, you can abstract common functionality into reusable functions, classes, or modules.
Example: The common greeting formatting logic is extracted into a reusable formatGreeting function, which makes the code DRY and easier to maintain.
function formatGreeting(name, message) {
return message + ", " + name + "!";
}
function greetUser(name) {
console.log(formatGreeting(name, "Hello"));
}
function sayGoodbye(name) {
console.log(formatGreeting(name, "Goodbye"));
}
YAGNI is an extreme programming practice that states “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.”
It doesn’t mean avoiding flexibility in code but rather not overengineer everything based on assumptions about future needs. The principle means delivering the most critical features on time and prioritizing them based on necessity.
This principle states that the code must be simple over complex to enhance comprehensibility, usability, and maintainability. Direct and clear code is better to avoid making it bloated or confusing.
Example: The function directly multiplies the length and width to calculate the area and there are no extra steps or conditions that might confuse or complicate the code.
def calculate_area(length, width):
return length * width
According to ‘The Boy Scout Rule’, always leave the code in a better state than you found it. In other words, make continuous, small enhancements whenever engaging with the codebase. It could be either adding a feature or fixing a bug. It encourages continuous improvement and maintains a high-quality codebase over time.
Example: The original code had unnecessary complexity due to the redundant variable and nested conditional. The cleaned-up code is more concise and easier to understand.
Before:
def factorial(n):
if n == 0:
return 1
else:
return n * factorial(n - 1)
# Before:
result = factorial(5)
print(result)
# After:
print(factorial(5))
After:
def factorial(n):
return 1 if n == 0 else n * factorial(n - 1)
This principle indicates that the code must fail as early as possible. This limits the bugs that make it into production and promptly addresses errors. This ensures the code remains clean, reliable, and usable.
As per the Open/Closed Principle, the software entities should be open to extension but closed to modification. This means that team members must add new functionalities to an existing software system without changing the existing code.
Example: The Open/Closed Principle allows adding new employee types (like "intern" or "contractor") without modifying the existing calculate_salary function. This makes the system more flexible and maintainable.
Without the Open/Closed Principle
def calculate_salary(employee_type):
if employee_type == "regular":
return base_salary
elif employee_type == "manager":
return base_salary * 1.5
elif employee_type == "executive":
return base_salary * 2
else:
raise ValueError("Invalid employee type")
With the Open/Closed Principle
class Employee:
def calculate_salary(self):
raise NotImplementedError()
class RegularEmployee(Employee):
def calculate_salary(self):
return base_salary
class Manager(Employee):
def calculate_salary(self):
return base_salary * 1.5
class Executive(Employee):
def calculate_salary(self):
return base_salary * 2
When you choose to approach something in a specific way, ensure maintaining consistency throughout the entire project. This includes consistent naming conventions, coding styles, and formatting. It also ensures that the code aligns with team standards, to make it easier for others to understand and work with. Consistent practice also allows you to identify areas for improvement and learn new techniques.
This means to use ‘has-a’ relationships (containing instances of other classes) instead of ‘is-a’ relationships (inheriting from a superclass). This makes the code more flexible and maintainable.
Example: In this example, the SportsCar class has a Car object as a member, and it can also have additional components like a spoiler. This makes it more flexible, as we can easily create different types of cars with different combinations of components.
class Engine:
def start(self):
pass
class Car:
def __init__(self, engine):
self.engine = engine
class SportsCar(Car):
def __init__(self, engine, spoiler):
super().__init__(engine)
self.spoiler = spoiler
Avoid hardcoded numbers, rather use named constants or variables to make the code more readable and maintainable.
Example:
Instead of:
discount_rate = 0.2
Use:
DISCOUNT_RATE = 0.2
This makes the code more readable and easier to modify if the discount rate needs to be changed.
Typo’s automated code review tool enables developers to catch issues related to code issues and detect code smells and potential bugs promptly.
With automated code reviews, auto-generated fixes, and highlighted hotspots, Typo streamlines the process of merging clean, secure, and high-quality code. It automatically scans your codebase and pull requests for issues, generating safe fixes before merging to master. Hence, ensuring your code stays efficient and error-free.
The ‘Goals’ feature empowers engineering leaders to set specific objectives for their tech teams that directly support writing clean code. By tracking progress and providing performance insights, Typo helps align teams with best practices, making it easier to maintain clean, efficient code. The goals are fully customizable, allowing you to set tailored objectives for different teams simultaneously.
Writing clean code isn’t just a crucial skill for developers. It is an important way to sustain software development projects.
By following the above-mentioned principles, you can develop a habit of writing clean code. It will take time but it will be worth it in the end.
Platform engineering is a relatively new and evolving field in the tech industry. To make the most of Platform Engineering, there are several best practices you should be aware of.
In this blog, we explore these practices in detail and provide insights into how you can effectively implement them to optimize your development processes and foster innovation.
Platform Engineering, an emerging technology approach, is the practice of designing and managing the infrastructure and tools that support software development and deployment. This is to help them perform end-to-end operations of software development lifecycle automation. The aim is to reduce overall cognitive load, increase operational efficiency, and remove process bottlenecks by providing a reliable and scalable platform for building, deploying, and managing applications.
Always treat your platform engineering team as paying customers. This allows you to understand developers’ pain points, preferences, and requirements and focus on making the development process easier and more efficient. Some of the key points that are taken into consideration:
When the above-mentioned needs and requirements are met, end-users are likely to adopt this platform enthusiastically. Hence, making the platform more effective and productive.
Implement security control at every layer of the platform. Make sure that audit security posture is conducted regularly and that everyone on the team is updated with the latest security patches. Besides this, conduct code reviews and code analysis to identify and fix security vulnerabilities quickly. Educate your platform engineering team about security practices and offer them ongoing training and mentorship so they are constantly upskilling.
Continuous improvement must be a core principle to allow the platform to evolve according to technical trends. Integrate feedback mechanisms with the internal developer platform to gather insights from the software development lifecycle. Regularly review and improve the platform based on feedback from development teams. This enables rapid responses to any impediments developers face.
Foster communication and knowledge sharing among platform engineers. Align them with common goals and objects and recognize their collaborative efforts. This helps teams to understand how their work contributes to the overall success of the platform which further, fosters a sense of unity and purpose. It also ensures that all stakeholders understand how to effectively use the platform and contribute to its continuous improvement.
View your internal platform as a product that requires management and ongoing development. The platform team must be driven by a product mindset that includes publishing roadmaps, gathering user feedback, and fostering a customer-centric approach. They must focus on what offers real value to their internal customers and app developers based on the feedback, so it addresses the pain points quickly.
Emphasize the importance of a DevOps culture that prioritizes collaboration between development and operations teams that focuses on learning and improvement rather than assigning time. It is crucial to foster an environment where platform engineering can thrive and foster a shared responsibility for the software lifecycle.
Typo is an effective platform engineering tool that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Typo has an effective sprint analysis feature that tracks and analyzes the team’s progress throughout a sprint. Besides this, It also provides 360 views of the developer experience i.e. captures qualitative insights and provides an in-depth view of the real issues.
Platform Engineering is reshaping how we approach software development by streamlining infrastructure management and improving operational efficiency. Adhering to best practices allows organizations to harness the full potential of their platforms. Embracing these principles will optimize your development processes, drive innovation, and ensure a stable foundation for future growth.
The era when development and operations teams worked in isolation, rarely interacting, is over. This outdated approach led to significant delays in developing and launching new applications. Modern IT leaders understand that DevOps is a more effective strategy.
DevOps fosters collaboration between software development and IT operations, enhancing the speed, efficiency, and quality of software delivery. By leveraging DevOps tools, the software development process becomes more streamlined through improved team collaboration and automation.
DevOps is a methodology that merges software development (Dev) with IT operations (Ops) to shorten the development lifecycle while maintaining high software quality.
Creating a DevOps culture promotes collaboration, which is essential for continuous delivery. IT operations and development teams share ideas and provide prompt feedback, accelerating the application launch cycle.
In the competitive startup environment, time equates to money. Delayed product launches risk competitors beating you to market. Even with an early market entry, inefficient development processes can hinder timely feature rollouts that customers need.
Implementing DevOps practice helps startups keep pace with industry leaders, speeding up development without additional resource expenditure, improving customer experience, and aligning with business needs.
The foundation of DevOps rests on the principles of culture, automation, measurement, and sharing (CAMS). These principles drive continuous improvement and innovation in startups.
DevOps accelerates development and release processes through automated workflows and continuous feedback integration.
DevOps enhances workflow efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and minimizing manual errors.
DevOps ensures code changes are continuously tested and validated, reducing failure risks.
Automation tools are essential for accelerating the software delivery process. Startups should use CI/CD tools to automate testing, integration, and deployment. Recommended tools include:
CI/CD practices enable frequent code changes and deployments. Key components include:
IaC allows startups to manage infrastructure through code, ensuring consistency and reducing manual errors. Consider using:
Containerization simplifies deployment and improves resource utilization. Use:
Implement robust monitoring tools to gain visibility into application performance. Recommended tools include:
Incorporate security practices into the DevOps pipeline using:
SEI platforms provide critical insights into the engineering processes, enhancing decision-making and efficiency. Key features include:
Utilize collaborative tools to enhance communication among team members. Recommended tools include:
Promote a culture of continuous learning through:
Create a repository for documentation and coding standards using:
Typo is a powerful tool designed specifically for tracking and analyzing DevOps metrics. It provides an efficient solution for dev and ops teams seeking precision in their performance measurement.
Implementing DevOps best practices can markedly boost the agility, productivity, and dependability of startups.
By integrating continuous integration and deployment, leveraging infrastructure as code, employing automated testing, and maintaining continuous monitoring, startups can effectively tackle issues like limited resources and skill shortages.
Moreover, fostering a cooperative culture is essential for successful DevOps adoption. By adopting these strategies, startups can create durable, scalable solutions for end users and secure long-term success in a competitive landscape.
DORA metrics offer a valuable framework for assessing software delivery performance throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Measuring DORA key metrics allows engineering leaders to identify bottlenecks, improve efficiency, and enhance software quality, which impacts customer satisfaction. It is also a key indicator for measuring the effectiveness of continuous delivery pipelines.
In this blog post, we delve into the pros and cons of utilizing DORA metrics to optimize continuous delivery processes, exploring their impact on performance, efficiency, and delivering high-quality software
DORA metrics were developed by the DORA team founded by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Dr. Nicole Forsgren. These metrics are key performance indicators that measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the software delivery process and provide a data-driven approach to evaluate the impact of operational practices on software delivery performance.
In 2021, the DORA Team added Reliability as a fifth metric. It is based upon how well the user’s expectations are met, such as availability and performance, and measures modern operational practices.
Continuous delivery (CD) is a primary aspect of modern software development that automatically prepares code changes for release to a production environment. It is combined with continuous integration (CI) and together, these two practices are known as CI/CD.
CD pipelines hold significant importance compared to traditional waterfall-style development. A few of them are:
Continuous Delivery allows more frequent releases, allowing new features, improvements, and bug fixes to be delivered to end-users more quickly. It provides a competitive advantage by keeping the product up-to-date and responsive to user needs, which enhances customer satisfaction.
Automated testing and consistent deployment processes catch bugs and issues early. It improves the overall quality and reliability of the software and reduces the chances of defects reaching production.
When updates are smaller and more frequent, it reduces the complexity and risk associated with each deployment. If an issue does arise, it becomes easier to pinpoint the problem and roll back the changes.
CD practices can be scaled to accommodate growing development teams and more complex applications. It helps to manage the increasing demands of modern software development.
Continuous delivery allows teams to experiment with new ideas and features efficiently. This encourages innovation by allowing quick feedback and iteration cycles.
Implementing DORA metrics encourages teams to streamline their processes, reducing bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the delivery pipeline. It also allows the team to regularly measure and analyze these metrics which fosters a culture of continuous improvement. As a result, teams are motivated to identify and resolve inefficiencies.
Tracking DORA metrics encourages collaboration between DevOps and other stakeholders. Hence, fostering a more integrated and cooperative approach to software delivery. It further provides objective data that teams can use to make informed decisions, prioritize work, and align their efforts with business goals.
Continuous Delivery relies heavily on automated testing to catch defects early. DORA metrics help software teams track the testing processes’ effectiveness which ensures higher software quality. Faster deployment cycles and lower lead times enable quicker feedback from end-users. It allows software development teams to address issues and improve the product more swiftly.
Software teams can ensure that their deployments are more reliable and less prone to issues by monitoring and aiming to reduce the change failure rate. A low MTTR demonstrates a team’s capability to quickly recover from failures which minimizes downtime and its impact on users. Hence, increases the reliability and stability of the software.
Effective Incident Management
Incident management is an integral part of CD as it helps quickly address and resolve any issues that arise. This aligns with the DORA metric for Time to Restore Service as it ensures that any disruptions are quickly addressed, minimizing downtime, and maintaining service reliability.
The process of setting up the necessary software to measure DORA metrics accurately can be complex and time-consuming. Besides this, inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to misleading metrics which can affect decision-making and process improvements.
Implementing and maintaining the necessary infrastructure to track DORA metrics can be resource-intensive. It potentially diverts resources from other important areas and increases the risk of disproportionately allocating resources to high-performing teams or projects to improve metrics.
DORA metrics focus on specific aspects of the delivery process and may not capture other crucial factors including security, compliance, or user satisfaction. It is also not universally applicable as the relevance and effectiveness of DORA metrics can vary across different types of projects, teams, and organizations. What works well for one team may not be suitable for another.
Implementing DORA DevOps metrics requires changes in culture and mindset, which can be met with resistance from teams that are accustomed to traditional methods. Apart from this, ensuring that DORA metrics align with broader business goals and are understood by all stakeholders can be challenging.
While DORA Metrics are quantitative in nature, their interpretation and application of DORA metrics can be highly subjective. The definition and measuring metrics like ‘Lead Time for Changes’ or ‘MTTR’ can vary significantly across teams. It may result in inconsistencies in how these metrics are understood and applied across different teams.
As the tech landscape is evolving, there is a need for diverse evaluation tools in software development. Relying solely on DORA metrics can result in a narrow understanding of performance and progress. Hence, software development organizations necessitate a multifaceted evaluation approach.
And that’s why, Typo is here at your rescue!
Typo is an effective software engineering intelligence platform that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools. It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
While DORA metrics offer valuable insights into software delivery performance, they have their limitations. Typo provides a robust platform that complements DORA metrics by offering deeper insights into developer productivity and workflow efficiency, helping engineering teams achieve the best possible software delivery outcomes.
Scrum is known to be a popular methodology for software development. It concentrates on continuous improvement, transparency, and adaptability to changing requirements. Scrum teams hold regular ceremonies, including Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Reviews, and Sprint Retrospectives, to keep the process on track and address any issues.
With the help of DORA DevOps Metrics, Scrum teams can gain valuable insights into their development and delivery processes.
In this blog post, we discuss how DORA metrics help boost scrum team performance.
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are a compass for engineering teams striving to optimize their development and operations processes.
In 2015, The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) team was founded by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Dr. Nicole Forsgren to evaluate and improve software development practices. The aim is to enhance the understanding of how development teams can deliver software faster, more reliably, and of higher quality.
Four key DORA metrics are:
Reliability is a fifth metric that was added by the DORA team in 2021. It is based upon how well your user’s expectations are met, such as availability and performance, and measures modern operational practices. It doesn’t have standard quantifiable targets for performance levels rather it depends upon service level indicators or service level objectives.
DORA metrics are useful for Scrum team performance because they provide key insights into the software development and delivery process. Hence, driving operational performance and improving developer experience.
DORA metrics track crucial KPIs such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate which helps Scrum teams understand their efficiency and identify areas for improvement.
Teams can streamline their software delivery process and reduce bottlenecks by monitoring deployment frequency and lead time for changes. Hence, leading to faster delivery of features and bug fixes.
Tracking the change failure rate and MTTR helps software teams focus on improving the reliability and stability of their applications. Hence, resulting in more stable releases and fewer disruptions for users.
DORA metrics give clear data that helps teams decide where to improve, making it easier to prioritize the most impactful actions for better performance and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Regularly reviewing these metrics encourages a culture of continuous improvement. This helps software development teams to set goals, monitor progress, and adjust their practices based on concrete data.
DORA metrics allow DevOps teams to compare their performance against industry standards or other teams within the organization. This encourages healthy competition and drives overall improvement.
DORA metrics provide actionable data that helps Scrum teams identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks in their processes. Analyzing these metrics allows engineering leaders to make informed decisions about where to focus improvement efforts and reduce recovery time.
Firstly, understand the importance of DORA Metrics as each metric provides insight into different aspects of the development and delivery process. Together, these metrics offer a comprehensive view of the team’s performance and allow them to make data-driven decisions.
Scrum teams should start by setting baselines for each metric to get a clear starting point and set realistic goals. For instance, if a scrum team currently deploys once a month, it may be unrealistic to aim for multiple deployments per day right away. Instead, they could set a more achievable goal, like deploying once a week, and gradually work towards increasing their frequency.
Scrum teams must schedule regular reviews (e.g., during sprint retrospectives) to discuss the metrics to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in the data. This helps to track progress, pinpoint areas for improvement, and further allow them to make data-driven decisions to optimize their processes and adjust their goals as needed.
Use the insights gained from the metrics to drive ongoing improvements and foster a culture that values experimentation and learning from mistakes. By creating this environment, Scrum teams can steadily enhance their software delivery performance. Note that, this approach should go beyond just focusing on DORA metrics. it should also take into account other factors like developer productivity and well-being, collaboration, and customer satisfaction.
Encourage collaboration between development, operations, and other relevant teams to share insights and work together to address bottlenecks and improve processes. Make the metrics and their implications transparent to the entire team. You can use the DORA Metrics dashboard to keep everyone informed and engaged.
Typo is a powerful tool designed specifically for tracking and analyzing DORA metrics. It provides an efficient solution for DevOps and Scrum teams seeking precision in their performance measurement.
Leveraging DORA Metrics can transform Scrum team performance by providing actionable insights into key aspects of development and delivery. When implemented the right way, teams can optimize their workflows, enhance reliability, and make informed decisions to build high-quality software.
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Platform Engineering is becoming increasingly crucial. According to the 2024 State of DevOps Report: The Evolution of Platform Engineering, 43% of organizations have had platform teams for 3-5 years. The field offers numerous benefits, such as faster time-to-market, enhanced developer happiness, and the elimination of team silos.
However, there is one critical piece of advice that Platform Engineers often overlook: treat your platform as an internal product and consider your wider teams as your customers.
So, how can they do this effectively? It's important to measure what’s working and what isn’t using consistent indicators of success.
In this blog, we’ve curated the top platform engineering KPIs that software teams must monitor:
Platform Engineering, an emerging technology approach, enables the software engineering team with all the required resources. This is to help them perform end-to-end operations of software development lifecycle automation. The goal is to reduce overall cognitive load, enhance operational efficiency, and remove process bottlenecks by providing a reliable and scalable platform for building, deploying, and managing applications.
Platform Engineering KPIs offer insights into how well the platform performs under various conditions. They also help to identify loopholes and areas that need optimization to ensure the platform runs efficiently.
These metrics guide decisions on how to scale resources. It also ensures the capacity planning i.e. the platform can handle growth and increased load without performance degradation.
Tracking KPIs ensure that the platform remains robust and maintainable. This further helps to reduce technical debt and improve the platform’s overall quality.
They provide in-depth insights into how effectively the engineering team operates and help to identify areas for improvement in team dynamics and processes.
Regularly tracking and analyzing KPIs fosters a culture of continuous improvement. Hence, encouraging proactive problem-solving and innovation among platform engineers.
Deployment Frequency measures how often code is deployed into production per week. It takes into account everything from bug fixes and capability improvements to new features. It is a key metric for understanding the agility and efficiency of development and operational processes and highlights the team’s ability to deliver updates and new features.
The higher frequency with minimal issues reflects mature CI/CD processes and how platform engineering teams can quickly adapt to changes. Regularly tracking and adapting Deployment Frequency helps in continuous improvement as it reduces the risk of large, disruptive changes and delivers value to end-users effectively.
Lead Time is the duration between a code change being committed and its successful deployment to end-users. It is correlated with both the speed and quality of the platform engineering team. Higher lead time gives a clear sign of roadblocks in processes and the platform needs attention.
Low lead time indicates that the teams quickly adapt to feedback and deliver products timely. It also gives teams the ability to make rapid changes, allowing them to adapt to evolving user needs and market conditions. Tracking it regularly helps in streamlining workflows and reducing bottlenecks.
Change Failure Rate refers to the proportion or percentage of deployments that result in failure or errors. It indicates the rate at which changes negatively impact the stability or functionality of the system. CFR also provides a clear view of the platform’s quality and stability eg: how much effort goes into addressing problems and releasing code.
Lower CFR indicates that deployments are reliable, changes are thoroughly tested, and less likely to cause issues in production. Moreover, it also reflects a well-functioning development and deployment processes, boosting team confidence and morale.
Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) represents the average time taken to resolve a production failure/incident and restore normal system functionality each week. Low MTTR indicates that the platform is resilient, quickly recovers from issues, and efficiency of incident response.
Faster recovery time minimizes the impact on users, increasing their satisfaction and trust in service. Moreover, it contributes to higher system uptime and availability and enhances your platform’s reputation, giving you a competitive edge.
This KPI tracks the usage of system resources. It is a critical metric that optimizes resource allocation and cost efficiency. Resource Utilization balances several objectives with a fixed amount of resources.
It allows platform engineers to distribute limited resources evenly and efficiently and understand where exactly to spend. Resource Utilization also aids in capacity planning and helps in avoiding potential bottlenecks.
Error Rates measure the number of errors encountered in the platform. It identifies the stability, reliability, and user experience of the platform. High Error Rates indicate underlying problems that need immediate attention which can otherwise, degrade user experience, leading to frustration and potential loss of users.
Monitoring Error Rates helps in the early detection of issues, enabling proactive response, and preventing minor issues from escalating into major outages. It also provides valuable insights into system performance and creates a feedback loop that informs continuous improvement efforts.
Team Velocity is a critical metric that measures the amount of work completed in a given iteration (e.g., sprint). It highlights the developer productivity and efficiency as well as in planning and prioritizing future tasks.
It helps to forecast the completion dates of larger projects or features, aiding in long-term planning and setting stakeholder expectations. Team Velocity also helps to understand the platform teams’ capacity to evenly distribute tasks and prevent overloading team members.
Firstly, ensure that the KPIs support the organization’s broader objectives. A few of them include improving system reliability, enhancing user experience, or increasing development efficiency. Always focus on metrics that reflect the unique aspects of platform engineering.
Select KPIs that provide a comprehensive view of platform engineering performance. We’ve shared some critical KPIs above. Choose those KPIs that fit your objectives and other considered factors.
Assess current performance levels of software engineers to establish baselines. Set targets and ensure they are realistic and achievable for each KPI. They must be based on historical data, industry benchmarks, and business objectives.
Regularly analyze trends in the data to identify patterns, anomalies, and areas for improvement. Set up alerts for critical KPIs that require immediate attention. Don’t forget to conduct root cause analysis for any deviations from expected performance to understand underlying issues.
Lastly, review the relevance and effectiveness of the KPIs periodically to ensure they align with business objectives and provide value. Adjust targets based on changes in business goals, market conditions, or team capacity.
Typo is an effective platform engineering tool that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Typo has an effective sprint analysis feature that tracks and analyzes the team’s progress throughout a sprint. Besides this, It also provides 360 views of the developer experience i.e. captures qualitative insights and provides an in-depth view of the real issues.
Monitoring the right KPIs is essential for successful platform teams. By treating your platform as an internal product and your teams as customers, you can focus on delivering value and driving continuous improvement. The KPIs discussed above, provide a comprehensive view of your platform's performance and areas for enhancement.
There are other KPIs available as well that we have not mentioned. Do your research and consider those that best suit your team and objectives.
All the best!
There are two essential concepts in contemporary software engineering: DevOps and Platform Engineering.
In this article, We dive into how DevOps has revolutionized the industry, explore the emerging role of Platform Engineering, and compare their distinct methodologies and impacts.
DevOps is a cultural and technical movement aimed at unifying software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to improve collaboration, streamline processes, and enhance the speed and quality of software delivery. The primary goal of DevOps is to create a more cohesive, continuous workflow from development through to production.
Platform engineering is the practice of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. It focuses on creating internal developer platforms (IDPs) that provide standardized environments and services for development teams.
DevOps and Platform Engineering offer different yet complementary approaches to enhancing software development and delivery. DevOps focuses on cultural integration and automation, while Platform Engineering emphasizes providing a robust, scalable infrastructure platform. By understanding these technical distinctions, organizations can make informed decisions to optimize their software development processes and achieve their operational goals.
Platform engineering is a relatively new and evolving field in the tech industry. While it offers many opportunities, certain aspects are often overlooked.
In this blog, we discuss effective strategies for becoming a successful platform engineer and identify common pitfalls to avoid.
Platform Engineering, an emerging technology approach, enables the software engineering team with all the required resources. This is to help them perform end-to-end operations of software development lifecycle automation. The goal is to reduce overall cognitive load, enhance operational efficiency, and remove process bottlenecks by providing a reliable and scalable platform for building, deploying, and managing applications.
One important tip to becoming a great platform engineer is informing the entire engineering organization about platform team initiatives. This fosters transparency, alignment, and cross-team collaboration, ensuring everyone is on the same page. When everyone is aware of what’s happening in the platform team, it allows them to plan tasks effectively, offer feedback, raise concerns early, and minimize duplication of efforts. As a result, providing everyone a shared understanding of the platform, goals, and challenges.
When everyone on the platform engineering team has varied skill sets, it brings a variety of perspectives and expertise to the table. This further helps in solving problems creatively and approaching challenges from multiple angles.
It also lets the team handle a wide range of tasks such as architecture design and maintenance effectively. Furthermore, team members can also learn from each other (and so do you!) which helps in better collaboration and understanding and addressing user needs comprehensively.
Pull Requests and code reviews, when done manually, take a lot of the team’s time and effort. Hence, this gives you an important reason why to use automation tools. Moreover, it allows you to focus on more strategic and high-value tasks and lets you handle an increased workload. This further helps in accelerating development cycles and time to market for new features and updates which optimizes resource utilization and reduces operational costs over time.
Platform engineering isn’t all about building the underlying tools, it also signifies maintaining a DevOps culture. You must partner with development, security, and operations teams to improve efficiency and performance. This allows for having the right conversation for discovering bottlenecks, and flexibility in tool choices, and reinforces positive collaboration among teams.
Moreover, it encourages a feedback-driven culture, where teams can continuously learn and improve. As a result, aligning the team’s efforts closely with customer requirements and business objectives.
To be a successful platform engineer, it's important to stay current with the latest trends and technologies. Attending tech workshops, webinars, and conferences is an excellent way to keep up with industry developments. besides these offline methods, you can read blogs, follow tech influencers, listen to podcasts, and join online discussions to improve your knowledge and stay ahead of industry trends.
Moreover, collaborating with a team that possesses diverse skill sets can help you identify areas that require upskilling and introduce you to new tools, frameworks, and best practices. This combined approach enables you to better anticipate and meet customer needs and expectations.
Beyond DevOps metrics, consider factors like security improvements, cost optimization, and consistency across the organization. This holistic approach prevents overemphasis on a single area and helps identify potential risks and issues that might be overlooked when focusing solely on individual metrics. Additionally, it highlights areas for improvement and drives ongoing optimized efficiencies across all dimensions of the platform.
First things first, understand who your customers are. When platform teams prioritize features or improvements that don't meet software developers' needs, it negatively impacts their user experience. This can lead to poor user interfaces, inadequate documentation, and missing functionalities, directly affecting customers' productivity.
Therefore, it's essential to identify the target audience, understand their key requirements, and align with their requests. Ignoring this in the long run can result in low usage rates and a gradual erosion of customer trust.
One of the common mistakes that platform engineers make is not giving engineering teams enough tooling or ownership. This makes it difficult for them to diagnose and fix issues in their code. It increases the likelihood of errors and downtime as teams may struggle to thoroughly test and monitor code. Not only this, they may also struggle to spend more time on manual processes and troubleshooting which slows down the development time cycle.
Hence, it is always advisable to provide your team with enough tooling. Discuss with them what tooling they need, whether the existing ones are working fine, and what requirements they have.
When a lot of time is spent on planning, it results in analysis paralysis i.e. thinking too much of potential features and improvements rather than implementation and testing. This further results in delays in deliveries, hence, slowing down the development process and feedback loops.
Early and frequent shipping creates the right feedback loops that can enhance the user experience and improve the platform continuously. These feature releases must be prioritized based on how often certain deployment proceedings are performed. Make sure to involve the software developers as well to discover more effective solutions.
The documentation process is often underestimated. Platform engineers believe that the process is self-explanatory but this isn’t true. Everything around code, feature releases, and related to the platform must be comprehensively documented. This is critical for onboarding, troubleshooting, and knowledge transfer.
Well-written documents also help in establishing and maintaining consistent practices and standards across the team. It also allows an understanding of the system’s architecture, dependencies, and known issues.
Platform engineers must take full ownership of security issues. Lack of accountability can result in increased security risks and vulnerabilities specific to the platform. The limited understanding of unique risks and vulnerabilities can affect the system.
But that doesn’t mean that platform engineers must stop using third-party tools. They must leverage them however, they need to be complemented by internal processes or knowledge and need to be integrated into the design, development, and deployment phases of platform engineering.
Typo is an effective platform engineering tool that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Typo has an effective sprint analysis feature that tracks and analyzes the team’s progress throughout a sprint. Besides this, It also provides 360 views of the developer experience i.e. captures qualitative insights and provides an in-depth view of the real issues.
Implementing these strategies will improve your success as a platform engineer. By prioritizing transparency, diverse skill sets, automation, and a DevOps culture, you can build a robust platform that meets evolving needs efficiently. Staying updated with industry trends and taking a holistic approach to success metrics ensures continuous improvement.
Ensure to avoid the common pitfalls as well. By addressing these challenges, you create a responsive, secure, and innovative platform environment.
Hope this helps. All the best! :)
Efficiency in software development is crucial for delivering high-quality products quickly and reliably. This research investigates the impact of DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) Metrics — Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), and Change Failure Rate — on efficiency within the SPACE framework (Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Collaboration, Efficiency). Through detailed mathematical calculations, correlation with business metrics, and a case study of one of our customers, this study provides empirical evidence of their influence on operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and financial performance in software development organizations.
Efficiency is a fundamental aspect of successful software development, influencing productivity, cost-effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. The DORA Metrics serve as standardized benchmarks to assess and enhance software delivery performance across various dimensions. This paper aims to explore the quantitative impact of these metrics on SPACE efficiency and their correlation with key business metrics, providing insights into how organizations can optimize their software development processes for competitive advantage.
Previous research has highlighted the significance of DORA Metrics in improving software delivery performance and organizational agility (Forsgren et al., 2020). However, detailed empirical studies demonstrating their specific impact on SPACE efficiency and business metrics remain limited, warranting comprehensive analysis and calculation-based research.
Selection Criteria: A leading SaaS company based in the US, was chosen for this case study due to its scale and complexity in software development operations. With over 120 engineers distributed across various teams, the customer faced challenges related to deployment efficiency, reliability, and customer satisfaction.
Data Collection: Utilized the customer’s internal metrics and tools, including deployment logs, incident reports, customer feedback surveys, and performance dashboards. The study focused on a period of 12 months to capture seasonal variations and long-term trends in software delivery performance.
Contextual Insights: Gathered qualitative insights through interviews with the customer’s development and operations teams. These interviews provided valuable context on existing challenges, process bottlenecks, and strategic goals for improving software delivery efficiency.
Deployment Frequency: Calculated as the number of deployments per unit time (e.g., per day).
Example: They increased their deployment frequency from 3 deployments per week to 15 deployments per week during the study period.
Calculation:
Insight: Higher deployment frequency facilitated faster feature delivery and responsiveness to market demands.
Lead Time for Changes: Measured from code commit to deployment completion.
Example: Lead time reduced from 7 days to 1 day due to process optimizations and automation efforts.
Calculation:
Insight: Shorter lead times enabled TYPO’s customer to swiftly adapt to customer feedback and market changes.
MTTR (Mean Time to Recover): Calculated as the average time taken to restore service after an incident.
Example: MTTR decreased from 4 hours to 30 minutes through improved incident response protocols and automated recovery mechanisms.
Calculation:
Insight: Reduced MTTR enhanced system reliability and minimized service disruptions.
Change Failure Rate: Determined by dividing the number of failed deployments by the total number of deployments.
Example: Change failure rate decreased from 8% to 1% due to enhanced testing protocols and deployment automation.
Insight: Lower change failure rate improved product stability and customer satisfaction.
Revenue Growth: TYPO’s customer achieved a 25% increase in revenue attributed to faster time-to-market and improved customer satisfaction.
Customer Satisfaction: Improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 8 to 9, indicating higher customer loyalty and retention rates.
Employee Productivity: Increased by 30% as teams spent less time on firefighting and more on innovation and feature development.
The findings from our customer case study illustrate a clear correlation between improved DORA Metrics, enhanced SPACE efficiency, and positive business outcomes. By optimizing Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, MTTR, and Change Failure Rate, organizations can achieve significant improvements in operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and financial performance. These results underscore the importance of data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement practices in software development.
Typo is an intelligent engineering management platform used for gaining visibility, removing blockers, and maximizing developer effectiveness. Typo’s user-friendly interface and cutting-edge capabilities set it apart in the competitive landscape. Users can tailor the DORA metrics dashboard to their specific needs, providing a personalized and efficient monitoring experience. It provides a user-friendly interface and integrates with DevOps tools to ensure a smooth data flow for accurate metric representation.
In conclusion, leveraging DORA Metrics within software development processes enables organisations to streamline operations, accelerate innovation, and maintain a competitive edge in the market. By aligning these metrics with business objectives and systematically improving their deployment practices, companies can achieve sustainable growth and strategic advantages. Future research should continue to explore emerging trends in DevOps and their implications for optimizing software delivery performance.
Moving forward, Typo and similar organizations consider the following next steps based on the insights gained from this study:
Although we are somewhat late in presenting this summary, the insights from the 2023 State of DevOps Report remain highly relevant and valuable for the industry. The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program has significantly influenced software development practices over the past decade. Each year, the State of DevOps Report provides a detailed analysis of the practices and capabilities that drive success in software delivery, offering benchmarks that teams can use to evaluate their own performance. This blog summarizes the key findings from the 2023 report, incorporates additional data and insights from industry developments, and introduces the role of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) platform as highlighted by Gartner in 2024.
The 2023 State of DevOps Report draws from responses provided by over 36,000 professionals across various industries and organizational sizes. This year’s research emphasizes three primary outcomes:
Additionally, the report examines two key performance measures:
The 2023 report highlights the crucial role of culture in developing technical capabilities and driving performance. Teams with a generative culture — characterized by high levels of trust, autonomy, open information flow, and a focus on learning from failures rather than assigning blame — achieve, on average, 30% higher organizational performance. This type of culture is essential for fostering innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Building a successful organizational culture requires a combination of everyday practices and strategic leadership. Practitioners shape culture through their daily actions, promoting collaboration and trust. Transformational leadership is also vital, emphasizing the importance of a supportive environment that encourages experimentation and autonomy.
A significant finding in this year’s report is that a user-centric approach to software development is a strong predictor of organizational performance. Teams with a strong focus on user needs show 40% higher organizational performance and a 20% increase in job satisfaction. Leaders can foster an environment that prioritizes user value by creating incentive structures that reward teams for delivering meaningful user value rather than merely producing features.
An intriguing insight from the report is that the use of Generative AI, such as coding assistants, has not yet shown a significant impact on performance. This is likely because larger enterprises are slower to adopt emerging technologies. However, as adoption increases and more data becomes available, this trend is expected to evolve.
Investing in technical capabilities like continuous integration and delivery, trunk-based development, and loosely coupled architectures leads to substantial improvements in performance. For example, reducing code review times can improve software delivery performance by up to 50%. High-quality documentation further enhances these technical practices, with trunk-based development showing a 12.8x greater impact on organizational performance when supported by quality documentation.
Leveraging cloud platforms significantly enhances flexibility and, consequently, performance. Using a public cloud platform increases infrastructure flexibility by 22% compared to other environments. While multi-cloud strategies also improve flexibility, they can introduce complexity in managing governance, compliance, and risk. To maximize the benefits of cloud computing, organizations should modernize and refactor workloads to exploit the cloud’s flexibility rather than simply migrating existing infrastructure.
The report indicates that individuals from underrepresented groups, including women and those who self-describe their gender, experience higher levels of burnout and are more likely to engage in repetitive work. Implementing formal processes to distribute work evenly can help reduce burnout. However, further efforts are needed to extend these benefits to all underrepresented groups.
The Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped working arrangements, with many employees working remotely. About 33% of respondents in this year’s survey work exclusively from home, while 63% work from home more often than an office. Although there is no conclusive evidence that remote work impacts team or organizational performance, flexibility in work arrangements correlates with increased value delivered to users and improved employee well-being. This flexibility also applies to new hires, with no observable increase in performance linked to office-based onboarding.
The 2023 report highlights several key practices that are driving success in DevOps:
Implementing CI/CD pipelines is essential for automating the integration and delivery process. This practice allows teams to detect issues early, reduce integration problems, and deliver updates more frequently and reliably.
This approach involves developers integrating their changes into a shared trunk frequently, reducing the complexity of merging code and improving collaboration. Trunk-based development is linked to faster delivery cycles and higher quality outputs.
Designing systems as loosely coupled services or microservices helps teams develop, deploy, and scale components independently. This architecture enhances system resilience and flexibility, enabling faster and more reliable updates.
Automated testing is critical for maintaining high-quality code and ensuring that new changes do not introduce defects. This practice supports continuous delivery by providing immediate feedback on code quality.
Implementing robust monitoring and observability practices allows teams to gain insights into system performance and user behavior. These practices help in quickly identifying and resolving issues, improving system reliability and user satisfaction.
Using IaC enables teams to manage and provision infrastructure through code, making the process more efficient, repeatable, and less prone to human error. IaC practices contribute to faster, more consistent deployment of infrastructure resources.
Metrics are vital for guiding teams and driving continuous improvement. However, they should be used to inform and guide rather than set rigid targets, in accordance with Goodhart’s law. Here’s why metrics are crucial:
The Software Engineering Intelligence(SEI) platforms like Typo , as highlighted in Gartner’s research, plays a pivotal role in advancing DevOps practices. The SEI platform provides tools and frameworks that help organizations assess their software engineering capabilities and identify areas for improvement. This platform emphasizes the importance of integrating DevOps principles into the entire software development lifecycle, from initial planning to deployment and maintenance.
Gartner’s analysis indicates that organizations leveraging the SEI platform see significant improvements in their DevOps maturity, leading to enhanced performance, reduced time to market, and increased customer satisfaction. The platform’s comprehensive approach ensures that DevOps practices are not just implemented but are continuously optimized to meet evolving business needs.
The State of DevOps Report 2023 by DORA offers critical insights into the current state of DevOps, emphasizing the importance of culture, user focus, technical capabilities, cloud flexibility, and equitable work distribution.
For those interested in delving deeper into the State of DevOps Report 2023 and related topics, here are some recommended resources:
These resources provide extensive insights into DevOps principles and practices, offering practical guidance for organizations aiming to enhance their DevOps capabilities and achieve greater success in their software delivery processes.
Developed by Atlassian, JIRA is widely used by organizations across the world. Integrating it with Typo, an intelligence engineering platform, can help organizations gain deeper insights into the development process and make informed decisions.
Below are a few JIRA best practices and steps to integrate it with Typo.
Launched in 2002, JIRA is a software development tool agile teams use to plan, track, and release software projects. This tool empowers them to move quickly while staying connected to business goals by managing tasks, bugs, and other issues. It supports multiple languages including English and French.
P.S: You can get JIRA from Atlassian Marketplace.
Integrate JIRA with Typo to get a detailed visualization of projects/sprints/bugs. It can be further synced with development teams’ data to streamline and fasten delivery. Integrating also helps in enhancing productivity, efficiency, and decision-making capabilities for better project outcomes and overall organizational performance.
Below are a few benefits of integrating JIRA with Typo:
The best part about JIRA is that it is highly flexible. Hence, it doesn’t require any additional change to the configuration or existing workflow:
Incidents refer to unexpected events or disruptions that occur during the development process or within the software application. These incidents can include system failures, bugs, errors, outages, security breaches, or any other issues that negatively impact the development workflow or user experience.
A few JIRA best practices:
The Sprint analysis feature allows you to track and analyze your team’s progress throughout a sprint. It uses data from Git and issue management tool to provide insights into how your team is working. You can see how long tasks are taking, how often they’re being blocked, and where bottlenecks are occurring.
A few JIRA best practices are:
It reflects the measure of Planned vs Completed tasks in the given period. For a given time range, Typo considers the total number of issues created and assigned to the members of the selected team in the ‘To Do’ state and divides them by the total number of issues completed out of them in the ‘Done’ state.
A few JIRA best practices are:
Below are other common JIRA best practices that you and your development team must follow:
Follow the steps mentioned below:
Typo dashboard > Settings > Dev Analytics > Integrations > Click on JIRA
Give access to your Atlassian account
Select the projects you want to give access to Typo or select all the projects to get insights into all the projects & teams in one go.
And it’s done! Get all your sprint and issue-related insights in your dashboard now.
Implement these best practices to streamline Jira usage, and improve development processes, and engineering operations. These can further help teams achieve better results in their software development endeavors.
Sprint reviews aim to foster open communication, active engagement, alignment with goals, and clear expectations. Despite these noble goals, many teams face significant hurdles in achieving them. These challenges often stem from the complexities involved in managing these elements effectively.
To overcome these challenges, teams should adopt a set of best practices designed to enhance the efficiency and productivity of sprint reviews. The following principles provide a framework for achieving this:
Continuous dialogue is the cornerstone of Agile methodology. For sprint reviews to be effective, a culture of open communication must be established and ingrained in daily interactions. Leaders play a crucial role in fostering an environment where team members feel safe to share concerns and challenges without fear of repercussions. This approach minimizes friction and ensures issues are addressed promptly before they escalate.
Case Study: Atlassian, a leading software company, introduced regular, open discussions about project hurdles. This practice fostered a culture of transparency, allowing the team to address potential issues early and leading to more efficient sprint reviews. As a result, they saw a 30% reduction in unresolved issues by the end of each sprint.
Sprint reviews should be interactive sessions with two-way communication. Instead of having a single person present, these meetings should involve contributions from all team members. Passing the keyboard around and encouraging real-time discussions can make the review more dynamic and collaborative.
Case Study: HubSpot, a marketing and sales software company, transformed their sprint reviews by making them more interactive. During brainstorming sessions for new campaigns, involving all team members led to more innovative solutions and a greater sense of ownership and engagement across the team. HubSpot reported a 25% increase in team satisfaction scores and a 20% increase in creative solutions presented during sprint reviews.
While setting clear goals is essential, the real challenge lies in revisiting and realigning them throughout the sprint. Regular check-ins with both internal teams and stakeholders help maintain focus and ensure consistency.
Case Study: Epic Systems, a healthcare software company, improved their sprint reviews by regularly revisiting their primary goal of enhancing user experience. By ensuring that all new features and changes aligned with this objective, they were able to maintain focus and deliver a more cohesive product. This led to a 15% increase in user satisfaction ratings and a 10% reduction in feature revisions post-launch.
Effective sprint reviews require clear and mutual understanding. Teams must ensure they are not just explaining but also being understood. Setting the context at the beginning of each meeting, followed by a quick recap of previous interactions, can bridge any gaps.
Case Study: FedEx, a logistics giant, faced challenges with misaligned expectations during sprint reviews. Stakeholders often expected these meetings to be approval sessions, which led to confusion and inefficiency. To address this, FedEx started each sprint review with a clear definition of expectations and a quick recap of previous interactions. This approach ensured that all team members and stakeholders were aligned on objectives and progress, making the discussions more productive. Consequently, FedEx experienced a 20% reduction in project delays and a 15% improvement in stakeholder satisfaction.
Beyond the foundational principles of open communication, engagement, goal alignment, and clear expectations, there are additional strategies that can further enhance the effectiveness of sprint reviews:
Using data and metrics to track progress can provide objective insights into the team’s performance and highlight areas for improvement. Tools like burn-down charts, velocity charts, and cumulative flow diagrams can be invaluable in providing a clear picture of the team’s progress and identifying potential bottlenecks.
Example: Capital One, a financial services company, used velocity charts to track their sprint progress. By analyzing the data, they were able to identify patterns and trends, which helped them optimize their workflow and improve overall efficiency. They reported a 22% increase in on-time project completion and a 15% decrease in sprint overruns.
Continuous improvement is a key tenet of Agile. Incorporating feedback loops within sprint reviews can help teams identify areas for improvement and implement changes more effectively. This can be achieved through regular retrospectives, where the team reflects on what went well, what didn’t, and how they can improve.
Example: Amazon, an e-commerce giant, introduced regular retrospectives at the end of each sprint review. By discussing successes and challenges, they were able to implement changes that significantly improved their workflow and product quality. This practice led to a 30% increase in overall team productivity and a 25% improvement in customer satisfaction ratings.
Involving stakeholders in sprint reviews can provide valuable insights and ensure that the team is aligned with business objectives. Stakeholders can offer feedback on the product’s direction, validate the team’s progress, and provide clarity on priorities.
Example: Google started involving stakeholders in their sprint reviews. This practice helped ensure that the team’s work was aligned with business goals and that any potential issues were addressed early. Google reported a 20% improvement in project alignment with business objectives and a 15% decrease in project scope changes.
Atlassian, a leading software company, faced significant challenges with communication during sprint reviews. Developers were hesitant to share early feedback, which led to delayed problem-solving and escalated issues. The team decided to implement daily check-in meetings where all members could discuss ongoing challenges openly. This practice fostered a culture of transparency and ensured that potential issues were addressed promptly. As a result, the team’s sprint reviews became more efficient, and their overall productivity improved. Atlassian saw a 30% reduction in unresolved issues by the end of each sprint and a 25% increase in overall team morale.
HubSpot, a marketing and sales software company, struggled with engagement during their sprint reviews. Meetings were often dominated by a single presenter, with little input from other team members. To address this, HubSpot introduced interactive brainstorming sessions during sprint reviews, where all team members were encouraged to contribute ideas. This change led to more innovative solutions and a greater sense of ownership and engagement among the team. HubSpot reported a 25% increase in team satisfaction scores, a 20% increase in creative solutions presented during sprint reviews, and a 15% decrease in time to market for new features.
Epic Systems, a healthcare software company, had difficulty maintaining focus on their primary goal of enhancing user experience. Developers frequently pursued interesting but unrelated tasks. The company decided to implement regular check-ins to revisit and realign their goals. This practice ensured that all new features and changes were in line with the overarching objective, leading to a more cohesive product and improved user satisfaction. As a result, Epic Systems experienced a 15% increase in user satisfaction ratings, a 10% reduction in feature revisions post-launch, and a 20% improvement in overall product quality.
FedEx, a logistics giant, faced challenges with misaligned expectations during sprint reviews. Stakeholders often expected these meetings to be approval sessions, which led to confusion and inefficiency. To address this, FedEx started each sprint review with a clear definition of expectations and a quick recap of previous interactions. This approach ensured that all team members and stakeholders were aligned on objectives and progress, making the discussions more productive. Consequently, FedEx experienced a 20% reduction in project delays, a 15% improvement in stakeholder satisfaction, and a 10% increase in overall team efficiency.
Data and metrics can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of sprint reviews. For example, according to a report by VersionOne, 64% of Agile teams use burn-down charts to track their progress. These charts can highlight trends and potential bottlenecks, helping teams optimize their workflow.
Additionally, a study by the Project Management Institute (PMI) found that organizations that use Agile practices are 28% more successful in their projects compared to those that do not. This statistic underscores the importance of implementing effective Agile practices, including efficient sprint reviews.
Sprint reviews are a critical component of the Agile framework, designed to ensure that teams stay aligned on goals and progress. By addressing common challenges such as communication barriers, lack of engagement, misaligned goals, and unclear expectations, teams can significantly improve the effectiveness of their sprint reviews.
Implementing strategies such as fostering open communication, promoting active engagement, setting and reinforcing goals, ensuring clarity in expectations, leveraging data and metrics, incorporating feedback loops, and facilitating stakeholder involvement can transform sprint reviews into highly productive sessions.
By learning from real-life case studies and incorporating data-driven insights, teams can continuously improve their sprint review process, leading to better project outcomes and greater overall success.
Sprint reports are a crucial part of the software development process. They help in gaining visibility into the team’s progress, how much work is completed, and the remaining tasks.
While there are many tools available for sprint reports, the JIRA sprint report stands out to be the most reliable one. Thousands of development teams use it on a day-to-day basis. However, as the industry shifts towards continuous improvement, JIRA’s limitations may impact outcomes.
So, what can be the right alternative for sprint reports? And what factors to be weighed when choosing a sprint reports tool?
Sprints are the core of agile and scrum frameworks. It represents defined periods for completing and reviewing specific work.
Sprint allows developers to focus on pushing out small, incremental changes over large sweeping changes. Note that, they aren’t meant to address every technical issue or wishlist improvement. It lets the team members outline the most important issues and how to address them during the sprint.
Analyzing progress through sprint reports is crucial for several reasons:
Analyzing sprint reports ensures transparency among the team members. It includes an entire scrum or agile team that has a clear and shared view of work being done and pending tasks. There is no duplication of work since everything is visible to them.
Sprint reports allow software development teams to have a clear understanding and requirements about their work. This allows them to focus on prioritized tasks first, fix bottlenecks in the early stages and develop the right solutions for the problems. For engineering leaders, these reports give them valuable insights into their performance and progress.
Sprint reports eliminate unnecessary work and overcommitment for the team members. This allows them to allocate time more efficiently to the core tasks and let them discuss potential issues, risks and dependencies which further encourages continuous improvement. Hence, increasing the developers’ productivity and efficiency.
The sprint reports give team members a visual representation of how work is flowing through the system. It allows them to identify slowdowns or blockers and take corrective actions. Moreover, it allows them to make adjustments to their processes and workflow and prioritize tasks based on importance and dependencies to maximize efficiency.
JIRA sprint reports tick all of the benefits stated above. Here’s more to JIRA sprint reports:
Out of many sprint reporting software, JIRA Sprint Report stands out to be the out-of-the-box solution that is being used by many software development organizations. It is a great way to analyze team progress, keep everyone on track, and complete the projects on time.
You can easily create simple reports from the range of reports that can be generated from the scrum board:
Projects > Reports > Sprint report
There are many types of JIRA reports available for sprint analysis for agile teams. Some of them are:
JIRA sprint reports are built into JIRA software, convenient and are easy to use. It helps developers understand the sprint goals, organize and coordinate their work and retrospect their performance.
However, few major problems make it difficult for the team members to rely solely on these reports.
JIRA sprint reports measure progress predominantly via story points. For teams who are not working with story points, JIRA reports aren’t of any use. Moreover, it sidelines other potential metrics as well. This makes it challenging to understand team velocities and get the complete picture.
Another limitation is that the team has to read between the lines since it presents the raw data to team members. This doesn’t give accurate insights of what truly happening in the organization. Rather every individual can come with slightly different conclusions and can be misunderstood and misinterpreted in different ways.
JIRA add-ons need installation and have a steep learning curve which may require training or technical expertise. They are also restricted to the JIRA system making it challenging to share with external stakeholders or clients.
So, what can be done instead? Either the JIRA sprint report can be supplemented with another tool or a better alternative that considers all of its limitations. The latter option proves to be the right option since a sprint dashboard that shows all the data and reports at a single place saves time and effort.
Typo’s sprint analysis is a valuable tool for any team that is using an agile development methodology. It allows you to track and analyze your team’s progress throughout a sprint. It helps you gain visual insights into how much work has been completed, how much work is still in progress, and how much time is left in the sprint. This information can help you to identify any potential problems early on and take corrective action.
Our sprint analysis feature uses data from Git and issue management tools to provide insights into how your team is working. You can see how long tasks are taking, how often they’re being blocked, and where bottlenecks are occurring. This information can help you identify areas for improvement and make sure your team is on track to meet their goals.
It is easy to use and can be integrated with existing Git and Jira/Linear/Clickup workflows.
Work progress represents the percentage breakdown of issue tickets or story points in the selected sprint according to their current workflow status.
Typo considers all the issues in the sprint and categorizes them based on their current status category, using JIRA status category mapping. It shows three major categories by default:
These can be configured as per your custom processes. In the case of a closed sprint, Typo only shows the breakup of work on a ‘Completed’ & ‘Not Completed’ basis.
Work breakup represents the percentage breakdown of issue tickets in the current sprint according to their issue type or labels. This helps in understanding the kind of work being picked in the current sprint and plan accordingly.
Typo considers all the issue tickets in the selected sprint and sums them up based on their issue type.
Team Velocity represents the average number of completed issue tickets or story points across each sprint.
Typo calculates Team Velocity for each sprint in two ways :
To calculate the average velocity, the total number of completed issue tickets or story points are divided by the total number of allocated issue tickets or story points for each sprint.
Developer Workload represents the count of issue tickets or story points completed by each developer against the total issue tickets/story points assigned to them in the current sprint.
Once the sprint is marked as ‘Closed’, it starts reflecting the count of Issue tickets/Story points that were not completed and were moved to later sprints as ‘Carry Over’.
Typo calculates the Developer Workload by considering all the issue tickets/story points assigned to each developer in the selected sprint and identifying the ones that have been marked as ‘Done’/’Completed’. Typo categorizes these issues based on their current workflow status that can be configured as per your custom processes.
The assignee of a ticket is considered in either of the two ways as a default:
This logic is also configurable as per your custom processes.
Issue cycle time represents the average time it takes for an issue ticket to transition from the ‘In Progress’ state to the ‘Completion’ state.
For all the ‘Done’/’Completed’ tickets in a sprint, Typo measures the time spent by each ticket to transition from ‘In Progress’ state to ‘Completion’ state.
By default, Typo considers 24 hours in a day and 7 day work week. This can be configured as per your custom processes.
Scope creep is one of the common project management risks. It represents the new project requirements that are added to a project beyond what was originally planned.
Typo’s sprint analysis tool monitors it to quantify its impact on the team’s workload and deliverables.
Sprint analysis tool is important for sprint planning, optimizing team performance and project outcomes in agile environments. By offering comprehensive insights into progress and task management, it empowers teams to focus on sprint goals, make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement.
To learn more about this tool, visit our website!
The demand for software development analytics tools is on the rise. The organizations aren’t just focusing on outcomes now, they want to get in-depth insights into teams’ health and progress. These tools measure the effectiveness and productivity of the team by turning data into actionable insights.
There are many software development analytics platforms available in the market. We’ve listed out the top 6 tools that you can choose from:
Also known as an engineering management platform. These tools help engineering leaders and CTOs track team progress and health by combining various developer performance metrics, at a single place.
These software engineering analytics tools help gain visibility into the time spent on tasks, predict the time taken to complete the task, and report bugs and issues at an early stage. Hence, allowing organizations to make informed decisions, improve performance, and stay on schedule.
The software development industry is evolving. Engineering teams must stay updated with industry trends and best practices to deliver high-quality software to end-users. While meeting deadlines remains a crucial measure of a team’s performance and progress, it’s no longer the sole focus. Today, considerations extend to developers’ well-being and productivity that were usually overlooked earlier.
The organizations aren’t relying solely on DORA metrics now. They are combining it with other engineering metrics as well such as code churn, PR size, rework rate, and more to get in-depth insights into developers’ experience and performance. These software analytics tools consider both qualitative and quantitative aspects to evaluate developer success and gauge their burnout levels. This holistic approach enables engineering leaders to pinpoint bottlenecks, make informed decisions, and foster continuous improvement within their organizations.
Below are the top 6 software development analytics tools available in the market:
Typo is an effective software engineering intelligence platform that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools. It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Jellyfish is a GIT-tracking tool that tracks metrics by aligning engineering insights with business properties. It gives a complete insight into the product from Github and Jira which further helps to decide what business value it provides. It also shows the status of every pull request and commits on the team. As a result, it provides full visibility into how engineering work fits in with your business objectives. Jellyfish can also be integrated with Bitbucket, Gitlab, and Google Sheets. However, it lacks user configuration for creating custom supports and UI can be tricky initially.
Swarmia is a well-known engineering analytics platform that gives engineering leaders and teams visibility across three crucial areas: Business outcomes, developer productivity, and developer experience. Its automation capabilities and SOC 2 certification increase the speed of the tasks without compromising on the product’s quality or developers’ well-being. Swarmia can be integrated with tools such as source code hosting, issue trackers, and chat systems. However, Swarmia lacks integrated benchmarks, making it challenging to gauge metrics against industry standards.
LinearB is a real-time performance analysis tool that measures GIT data and meets business goals. It breaks different tasks into unique categories to refine reports and track individual or team performance. Besides this, LinearB can be integrated with Slack, JIRA, and popular CI/CD tools into testing and deployment metrics which helps to monitor the team’s progress in real-time. It also points out automatable tasks to the engineering teams that help in saving time and resources. The downside of LinearB is there are limited features to support SPACE framework metrics and individual performance insights.
Waydev is another leading software development analytics platform that puts more emphasis on market-based metrics. It also allows development teams to compare the ROI of specific products which helps to identify which features need improvement or removal. It also gives insights into the cost and progress of deliverables and key initiatives. Moreover, Waydev can be seamlessly integrated with Github, Gitlab, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, and other popular tools. However, this analytics tool is only available at the enterprise level.
Code climate velocity is an analytics platform that uses repos to synthesize data and provide in-depth visibility into code quality, code coverage, and security vulnerabilities. It analyses data from GIT repositories and then compresses it into real-time analytics. This tool supports both JIRA and GIT integration, Moreover, it can identify files that are frequently modified, and have poor coverage or maintenance issues. The drawback of Code Climate Velocity is that it includes non-standard metrics such as impact and traceability, they may not align intuitively with standard KPIs or OKRs.
If you’re still in a dilemma about why you should consider software analytics tools for your organization, below are a few benefits you can reflect on:
These tools offer data-driven insights that can help developers identify areas of improvement and fix them in the early stages. Moreover, these analytics tools allow teams to automate repetitive tasks. Hence, helping in reducing cycle time and ensuring consistent, error-free delivery.
Software development analytics tools continuously monitor and analyze development metrics and fix bottlenecks as early as possible. These tools can also forecast future quality based on historical data. As a result, allowing teams to deliver more reliable and stable software products and services.
These tools include dashboards and insights that provide stakeholders visibility into project progress, performance metrics, and team contributions. It helps in coordinating work and promoting transparency. Hence, fostering accountability among team members and encouraging collaboration towards common goals.
These analytics tools have automated packages too. This allows the team to cut costs and focus on high-value projects. These analytics platforms also take note of areas of improvement and developers’ needs. Hence, helping in making informed decisions and getting the best out of this investment.
Picking the right analytics is important for the development team. Check out these essential factors below before you make a purchase:
Consider how the tool can accommodate the team’s growth and evolving needs. It should handle increasing data volumes and support additional users and projects.
Error detection feature must be present in the analytics tool as it helps to improve code maintainability, mean time to recovery, and bug rates.
Developer analytics tools must compile with industry standards and regulations regarding security vulnerabilities. It must provide strong control over open-source software and indicate the introduction of malicious code.
These analytics tools must have user-friendly dashboards and an intuitive interface. They should be easy to navigate, configure, and customize according to your team’s preferences.
Software development analytics tools must be seamlessly integrated with your tech tools stack such as CI/CD pipeline, version control system, issue tracking tools, etc.
Software development analytics tools play a crucial role in project pipelines and measuring and maximizing developers’ productivity. It allows engineering managers to gain visibility into the team’s performance through user-friendly dashboards and reports.
Select analytics tools that align with your team’s needs and specifications. Make sure they seamlessly integrate with your existing and forthcoming tech tools.
While we’ve curated the top six tools in the market, take the time to conduct thorough research before making a purchase.
All the best! :)
The software development field is constantly evolving. Software must adhere to coding and compliance standards, should deploy on time, and be delivered to end-users quickly.
And in all these cases, mistakes are the last option for the software engineering team. Otherwise, they have to put in their energy and effort again and again.
This is how static code analysis comes to your rescue. They help development teams that are under pressure and decrease constant stress and worries.
Let’s learn more about static code analysis and its benefits:
Static code analysis is an effective method to examine source code before executing it. It is used by software developers and quality assurance teams. It identifies potential issues, vulnerabilities, and errors and also checks whether the coding style adheres to the coding rules and guidelines of MISRA and ISO 26262.
The word ‘Static’ states that it analyses and tests applications without executing them or compromising the production systems.
The major difference between static code analysis and Dynamic code analysis is that the former identifies issues before you run the program. In other words, it occurs in a non-runtime environment between the time you create and the performance unit testing.
Dynamic testing identifies issues after you run the program i.e. during unit testing. It is effective for finding subtle defects and vulnerabilities as it looks at code’s interactions with other servers, databases, and services. Dynamic code analysis catches issues that might be missed during static analysis.
Note that, the static and dynamic analysis shouldn’t be used as an alternative to each other. Development teams must optimize both and combine both methods to get effective results.
Static code analysis is done in the creation phase. Static code analyzer checks whether the code adheres to coding standards and best practices.
The first step is making source code files or specific codebases available to static analysis tools. Then, the compiler scans the source code and makes the program source code translate from human readability to machine code. It further breaks code into smaller pieces known as tokens.
The next stage is parsing. The tokens are taken and sequenced in a way that makes sense according to the programming language which further means using and organizing them into a structure known as Abstract Syntax Tree.
It helps in tracking the flow of data through the code to address potential issues such as uninitialized variables, null pointers, and data race conditions.
Control flow analysis helps to identify bugs like infinite loops and unreachable code.
It assesses the overall quality of code by examining factors like complexity, maintainability, and potential design flaws. It provides insights into potential areas of improvement that lead to more efficient and maintainable code.
Memory management that is improper can lead to memory leaks and decrease performance. It can identify areas of code that cause memory leaks. Hence, assisting developers to prevent resource leaks and enhancing application stability.
Effective static code analysis can detect potential issues early in the development cycle. It can catch bugs and vulnerabilities earlier that may otherwise go unnoticed until runtime. Hence, lowering the chances that crucial errors will go to the production stage leads to preventing developers from costly and time-consuming debugging efforts later.
Static code analysis reduces the manual and repetitive efforts that are required for code inspection. As a result, it frees developers time to focus more on creative and complex tasks. This not only enhances developers productivity but also streamlines the development cycle process.
Static code analysis enforces coding protocols, ensuring development teams follow a unified coding style, coding standards, and best practices. Hence, increasing the code readability, understandability, and maintainability. Moreover, static code analysis also enforces security standards and compliance by scanning code for potential vulnerabilities.
With the help of static code analysis, developers can spend more time on new code and less time on existing code as they don’t have to perform a manual code review. Static code analysis identifies and alerts users to problematic code and finds vulnerabilities even in the most remote and unattended parts of the code.
Static code analysis provides insights and reports on the overall health of code. This also helps in performing high-level analysis. Hence, spotting and fixing errors early, understanding code complexity and maintainability, and whether they adhere to industry coding standards and best practices.
Static code analysis tools have scope limitations since they can only identify issues without executing the code. Consequently, performance, security, logical vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations that might be found during execution cannot be detected through them.
Static code analysis can sometimes produce false positive/negative results. False negative occurs when vulnerabilities are discovered but not reported by the tool. Similarly, a false positive arises when new vulnerabilities in an external environment are uncovered or it has no runtime knowledge. In both cases, it leads to additional time and effort.
Static code analysis may miss the broader architectural and functional aspects of the code being analyzed. It can lead to false positive/negative results, as mentioned above, and also miss problematic or genuine issues due to a lack of understanding of the code’s intended behavior and usage context.
AI-powered static code analysis tools leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to find and catch security vulnerabilities early in the application development life cycle. These AI tools can scan applications with far greater precision and accuracy than traditional queries and rule sets.
Typo’s automated code review tool not only enables developers to merge clean, secure, high-quality code, faster. It lets developers catch issues related to maintainability, readability, and potential bugs and can detect code smells. It auto-analyses your codebase and pulls requests to find issues and auto-generates fixes before you merge to master.
Typo’s Auto-Fix feature leverages GPT 3.5 Pro to generate line-by-line code snippets where the issue is detected in the codebase. This means less time reviewing and more time for important tasks. As a result, making the whole process faster and smoother.
Issue detection by Typo
Autofixing the codebase with an option to directly create a Pull Request
Typo supports a variety of programming languages, including popular ones like C++, JS, Python, and Ruby, ensuring ease of use for developers working across diverse projects.
Typo understands the context of your code and quickly finds and fixes any issues accurately. Hence, empowering developers to work on software projects seamlessly and efficiently.
Typo uses optimized practices and built-in methods spanning multiple languages. Hence, reducing code complexity and ensuring thorough quality assurance throughout the development process.
Typo standardizes code and reduces the risk of a security breach.
Code complexity is almost unavoidable in modern software development. High code complexity, when not tackled on time, leads to an increase in bugs, and technical debt, and negatively impacts the performance.
Let’s dive in further to explore the concept of cognitive complexity in software.
Code complexity refers to how difficult it is to understand, modify, and maintain the software codebase. It is influenced by various factors such as lines of code, code structure, number of dependencies, and algorithmic complexity.
Code complexity exists at multiple levels including the system architecture level, within individual modules or single code blocks.
The more the code complexity, the more complex a piece of code is. Hence, developers use it to make efforts to minimize it wherever possible. By managing code complexity, developers can reduce costs, improve software quality, and provide a better user experience.
In complex code, it becomes difficult to identify the root cause of bugs. Hence, making debugging a more arduous job. These changes can further have unintended consequences due to unforeseen interactions with other parts of the system. By measuring code complexity, developers can particularly complex identity areas that they can further simplify to reduce the number of bugs and improve the overall reliability of the software.
Managing code complexity increases collaboration between team members. Identifying areas of code that are particularly complex requires additional expertise. Hence, enhancing the shared understanding of code by reviewing, refactoring, or redesigning these areas to improve code maintainability and readability.
High code complexity presents various challenges for testing such as increased test case complexity and reduced test coverage. Code complexity metrics help testers assess the adequacy of test coverage. It allows them to indicate areas of the code that may require thorough testing and validation. Hence, they can focus on high code complexity areas first and then move on to lower complexity areas.
Complex code can also impact performance as complex algorithms and data structures can lead to slower execution times and excessive memory consumption. It can further hinder software performance in the long run. Managing code complexity encourages adherence to best practices for writing clean and efficient code. Hence, enhancing the performance of their software systems and delivering better-performing applications to end-users.
High code readability leads to an increase in code quality. However, when the code is complex, it lacks readability. This further increases the cognitive load of the developers and slows down the software development process.
The overly complex code is less modular and reusable which hinders the code clarity and maintenance.
The main purpose of documentation is to help engineers work together to build a product and have clear requirements of what needs to be done. The unavailability of documentation may make developers’ work difficult since they have to revisit tasks, undefined tasks, and code overlapping and duplications.
Architectural decisions dictate the way the software is written, how to improve it, tested against, and much more. When such decisions are not well documented or communicated effectively, it may lead to misunderstandings and inconsistency in implementation. Moreover, when the architectural decisions are not scalable, it may make the codebases difficult to extend and maintain as the system grows.
Coupling refers to the connection between one piece of code to another. However, it is to be noted that they shouldn’t be highly dependent on each other. Otherwise, it leads to high coupling. It increases the interdependence between modules which makes the system more complex and difficult to understand. Moreover, it also makes the code difficult to isolate and test them independently.
Cyclomatic complexity was developed by Thomas J. Mccabe in 1976. It is a crucial metric that determines the given piece of code complexity. It measures the number of linearly independent paths through a program’s source code. It is suggested cyclomatic complexity must be less than 10 for most cases. More than 10 means the need for refactoring the code.
To effectively implement this formula in software testing, it is crucial to initially represent the source code as a control flow graph (CFG). The CFG is a directed graph comprising nodes, each representing a basic block or a sequence of non-branching statements, and edges denoting the control flow between these blocks.
Once the CFG for the source code is established, cyclomatic complexity can be calculated using one of the three approaches:
In each approach, an integer value is computed, indicating the number of unique pathways through the code. This value not only signifies the difficulty for developers to understand but also affects testers’ ability to ensure optimal performance of the application or system.
Higher values suggest greater complexity and reduced comprehensibility, while lower numbers imply a more straightforward, easy-to-follow structure.
The primary components of a program’s CFG are:
For instance, let’s consider the following simple function:
def simple_function(x):
if x > 0:
print(“X is positive”)
else:
print(“X is not positive”)
In this scenario:
E = 2 (number of edges)
N = 3 (number of nodes)
P = 1 (single connected component)
Using the formula, the cyclomatic complexity is calculated as follows: CC = 2 – 3 + 2*1 = 1
Therefore, the cyclomatic complexity of this function is 1, indicating very low complexity.
This metric comes in many built-in code editors including VS code, linters (FlakeS and jslinter), and IDEs (Intellij).
Sonar developed a cognitive complexity metric that evaluates the understandability and readability of the source code. It considers the cognitive effort required by humans to understand it. It is measured by assigning weights to various program constructs and their nesting levels.
The cognitive complexity metric helps in identifying code sections and complex parts such as nested loops or if statements that might be challenging for developers to understand. It may further lead to potential maintenance issues in the future.
Low cognitive complexity means it is easier to read and change the code, leading to better-quality software.
Halstead volume metric was developed by Maurice Howard Halstead in 1977. It analyzes the code’s structure and vocabulary to gauge its complexities.
The formula of Halstead volume:
N * log 2(n)
Where, N = Program length = N1 + N2 (Total number of operators + Total number of operands)
n = Program vocabulary = n1 + n2 (Number of operators + number of operands)
The Halstead volume considers the number of operators and operands and focuses on the size of the implementation of the module or algorithm.
The rework ratio measures the amount of rework or corrective work done on a project to the total effort expended. It offers insights into the quality and efficiency of the development process.
The formula of the Rework ratio:
Total effort / Effort on rework * 100
Where, Total effort = Cumulative effort invested in the entire project
Effort on rework = Time and resources spent on fixing defects, addressing issues, or making changes after the initial dev phase
While rework is a normal process. However, a high rate of rework is considered to be a problem. It indicates that the code is complex, prone to errors, and potential for defects in the codebase.
This metric measures the score of how easy it is to maintain code. The maintainability index is a combination of 4 metrics – Cyclomatic complexity, Halstead volume, LOC, and depth of inheritance. Hence, giving an overall picture of complexity.
The formula of the maintainability index:
171 – 5.2 * ln(V) – 0.23 * (G) – 16.2 * ln(LOC)
The higher the score, the higher the level of maintainability.
0-9 = Very low level of maintainability
10-19 = Low level of maintainability
20-29 = Moderate level of maintainability
30-100 = Good level of maintainability
This metric determines the potential challenges and costs associated with maintaining and evolving a given software system.
It is the easiest way to calculate and purely look at the number of LOCs. LOC includes instructions, statements, and expressions however, typically excludes comments and blank lines.
Counting lines of executable code is a basic measure of program size and can be used to estimate developers’ effort and maintenance requirements. However, it is to be noted that it alone doesn’t provide a complete picture of code quality or complexity.
The requirements should be clearly defined and well-documented. A clear roadmap should be established to keep projects on track and prevent feature creep and unnecessary complexities.
It helps in building a solid foundation for developers and maintains the project’s focus and clarity. The requirements must ensure that the developers understand what needs to be built reducing the likelihood of misinterpretation.
Break down software into smaller, self-contained modules. Each module must have a single responsibility i.e. focus on specific functions to make it easier to understand, develop, and maintain the code.
It is a powerful technique to manage complex code as well as encourages code reusability and readability.
Refactor continuously to eliminate redundancy, improve code readability and clarity, and adhere to best practices. It also helps streamline complex code by breaking down it into smaller, more manageable components.
Through refactoring, the development team can identify and remove redundant code such as dead code, duplicate code, or unnecessary branches to reduce the code complexity and enhance overall software quality.
Code reviews help maintain code quality and avoid code complexity. It identifies areas of code that may be difficult to understand or maintain later. Moreover, peer reviews provide valuable feedback and in-depth insights regarding the same.
There are many code review tools available in the market. They include automated checks for common issues such as syntax errors, code style violations, and potential bugs and enforce coding standards and best practices. This also saves time and effort and makes the code review process smooth and easy.
Typo’s automated code review tool not only enables developers to catch issues related to maintainability, readability, and potential bugs but also can detect code smells. It identifies issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master. This means less time reviewing and more time for important tasks. It keeps the code error-free, making the whole process faster and smoother.
Key features
Understanding and addressing code complexity is key to ensuring code quality and software reliability. By recognizing its causes and adopting strategies to reduce them, development teams can mitigate code complexity and enhance code maintainability, understandability, and readability.
There is no ‘One Size approach’ in the software development industry. Combining creative ways with technical processes is the best way to solve problems.
While it seems exciting, there is one drawback as well. There are a lot of disagreements between developers due to differences in ideas and solutions. Communication is the key for most cases, but this isn’t feasible every time. There are times when developers can’t come to a general agreement.
This is when the HOOP (Having opposite opinions and picking solutions) system works best for the team.
But, before we dive deeper into this topic, let’s first know what the Mini hoop basketball game is about:
Simply put, it is a smaller version of basketball that can be played indoors. It includes a smaller ball and hoop mounted on a wall or door.
A mini basketball hoop is a fun way to practice basketball skills and is usually enjoyed by people of all ages.
Below are a few ways how this game can positively impact developers in conflict-resolving and strengthening relationships with other team members:
This game creates a casual and enjoyable environment that strengthens team bonds, improving collaboration during work hours.
When developers take short breaks for a game, it helps prevent burnout and maintains high concentration levels during work hours. It leads to more efficient problem-solving and coding.
Developers practice conflict resolution when such differences arise in the game. As a result, they can apply these skills in the workplace.
Indoor basketball hoop game contributes to a positive work environment as they instill a sense of fun and camaraderie. Hence, it positively impacts morale and motivation.
Here's a step-by-step breakdown of the official rules for dev mini-hoop basketball:
Start with Player 1, then proceed sequentially through players 2, 3, etc. Each player takes a shot from a spot of their choice.
If the player before you makes a shot, make your shot exactly from the same spot. If you miss, you receive a strike.
After a miss, the next player starts a new round from a different spot. If you make the shot, the next player replicates it from the same spot. If missed, they receive a strike.
Once a player hits the three-strike mark, they are out.
The game continues until there is a winner.
The game usually concludes in about 10 minutes, if the whole team participates.
Dev Mini Hoop Basketball game is a fun way to resolve conflicts and strengthen relationships with other team members. Try it out with your team now!
Continuous integration/Continuous delivery (CI/CD) is positively impacting software development teams. It is becoming a common agile practice that is widely been adopted by organizations around the world.
Hence, for the same, it is advisable to have good CI/CD tools to leverage the team’s current workflow and build a reliable CI/CD pipeline. Further, it automates the development process and lowers the delivery time to the end-users.
There are an overflowing number of CI/CD tools available in the market right now. Thus, we have listed the top 14 tools to know about in 2024. But, before we move forward, understand these two distinct phases: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery:
CI refers to the practices that drive the software development team to automatically and frequently integrate code changes into a shared source code repository. It helps in speeding up the process of building, packaging, and testing the applications. Although automated testing is not strictly part of CI, it is usually implied.
With this methodology, the team members can check whether the application is broken whenever new commits are integrated into the new branch. It allows them to catch and fix quality issues early and get quick feedback.
This ensures that the software products are released to the end-users as quickly as possible (Every week, every day, or multiple times a day - As per the organization) and can create more features that provide value to them.
The CD begins when the continuous integration ends.
It is an approach that allows teams to package software and deploy it into the production environment. It includes staging, testing, and deployment of CI code.
It assures that the application is updated continuously with the latest code changes and that new features are delivered to the end users quickly. Hence, it helps to reduce the time to market and of higher quality.
Moreover, continuous delivery minimizes downtime due to the removal of manual steps and human errors.
CI/CD pipeline helps in building and delivering software to end-users at a rapid pace. It allows the development team to launch new features faster, implement deployment strategy, and collect feedback to incorporate promptly in the upcoming update.
CI/CD pipeline offers regular updates on the products and a set of metrics that include building, testing, coverage, and more. The release cycles are short and targeted and maintenance is done during non-business hours saving the entire team valuable time.
CI/CD pipeline gives real-time feedback on code quality, test results, and deployment status. It provides timely feedback to work more efficiently, identify issues earlier, gather actionable insights, and make iterative improvements.
CI/CD pipeline encourages collaboration between developers, testers, and operation teams to reduce bottlenecks and facilitate communication. Through this, the team can communicate effectively about test results and take the desired action.
CI/CD pipeline enforces a rigorous testing process and conducts automated tests at every pipeline stage. The code changes are thoroughly tested and validated to reduce the bugs or regressions in software.
It is a software development platform for managing different aspects of the software development lifecycle. With its cloud-based CI and deployment service, this tool allows developers to trigger builds, run, tests, and deploy code with each commit or push.
GitLab CI/CD also assures that all code deployed to production adheres to all code standards and best practices.
GitHub Actions is a comparatively new tool for performing CI/CD. It automates, customizes, and executes software development workflows right in the repository.
GitHub Actions can also be paired with packages to simplify package management. It creates custom SDLC workflows in the GitHub repository directly and supports event-based triggers for automated build, test, and deployment.
Jenkins is the first CI/CD tool that provides thousands of plugins to support building and deploying projects. It is an open source as well as a self-hosted automated server in which the central build and continuous integration take place. This tool can also be turned into a continuous delivery platform for any project.
It is usually an all-rounder choice for the modern development environment.
Circle CI is a CI/CD tool that is certified with FebRamp and SOC Type II compliant. It helps in achieving CI/CD in open-source and large-scale projects. It streamlines the DevOps process and automates builds across multiple environments.
Circle CI provides two host offerings:
An integrated CI/CD tool that is integrated into Bitbucket. It automates code from test to production and lets developers track how pipelines are moving forward at each step.
Bitbucket pipelines ensure that code has no merge conflicts, accidental code deletions, or broken tests. Cloud containers are generated for every activity on Bitbucket that can be used to run commands with all the benefits of brand-new system configurations.
A CI/CD tool that helps in building and deploying different types of projects on GitHub and Bitbucket. It runs in a Java environment and supports .Net and open-stack projects.
TeamCity offers flexibility for all types of development workflow and practices. It archives or backs up all modifications errors and builds for future use.
Semaphore is a CI/CD platform with a pull-request-based development workflow. Through this platform, developers can automate build, test, and deploy software projects with the continuous feedback loop.
Semaphore is available on a wide range of platforms such as Linux, MacOS, and Android. This tool can help in everything i.e. simple sequential builds to multi-stage parallel pipelines.
Azure DevOps by Microsoft combines continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline to Azure. It includes self-hosted and cloud-hosted CI/CD models for Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
It builds, tests, and deploys applications to the transferred location. The transferred locations include multiple target environments such as containers, virtual machines, or any cloud platform.
Bamboo is a CI/CD server by Atlassian that helps software development teams automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code changes. It covers building and functional testing versions, tagging releases, and deploying and activating new versions on productions.
This streamlines software development and includes a feedback loop to make stable releases of software applications.
An open-source CI/CD tool that is a Python-based twisted framework. It automates complex testing and deployment processes. With its decentralized and configurable architect, it allows development teams to define and build pipelines using scripts based on Python.
Buildbot are usually for those who need deep customizability and have particular requirements in their CI/CD workflows.
Travis CI primarily focuses on GitHub users. It provides different host offerings for open-source communities and enterprises that propose to use this platform on their private cloud.
Travis CI is a simple and powerful tool that lets development teams sign up, link favorite repositories, and build and test applications. It checks the reliability and quality of code changes before integrating them into the production codebase.
Codefresh is a modern CI/CD tool that is built on the foundation of GitOps and Argo. It is Kubernetes-based and comes with two host offerings: Cloud and On-premise variants.
It provides a unique, container-based pipeline for a faster and more efficient build process. Codefresh offers a secure way to trigger builds, run tests, and deploy code to targeted locations.
Buddy is a CI/CD platform that builds, tests, and deploys websites and applications quickly. It includes two host offerings: On-premise and public cloud variants. It is best suited for developers, QA experts, and designers.
Buddy can not only integrate with Docker and Kubernetes, but also with blockchain technology. It gives the team direct deployment access to public repositories including GitHub.
Harness is the first CI/CD platform to leverage AI. It is a SaaS platform that builds, tests, deploys, and verifies on demand.
Harness is a self-sufficient CI tool and is container-native so all extensions are standardized and builds are isolated. Moreover, it sets up only one pipeline for the entire log.
Typo seamlessly integrates with your CI/CD tools and offers comprehensive insights into your deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency.
It also delivers a detailed overview of the workflows within the CI/CD environment. Hence, enhances visibility and facilitates a thorough understanding of the entire development and deployment pipeline.
The CI/CD tool should best align with the needs and goals of the team and organization. In terms of features, understand what is important according to the specific requirements, project, and goals.
The CI/CD tool should integrate smoothly into the developer workflow without requiring many customized scripts or plugins. The tool shouldn’t create friction or impose constraints on the testing framework and environment.
The CI/CD tool should include access control, code analysis, vulnerability scanning, and encryption. It should adhere to industry best practices and prevent malicious software from stealing source code.
They should integrate with the existing setup and other important tools that are used daily. Also, the CI/CD tool should be integrated with the underlying language used for codebase and compiler chains.
The tool should provide comprehensive feedback on multiple levels. It includes error messages, bug fixes, and infrastructure design. Besides this, the tool should notify of build features, test failures, or any other issues that need to be addressed.
The CI/CD tools mentioned above are the most popular ones in the market. Make sure you do your extensive research as well before choosing any particular tool.
All the best!
The journey of the software industry is full of challenges and innovations.
Cognitive complexity is one such aspect of software development. It takes into consideration how readable and understandable is the code for humans.
Let’s dig in further to explore the concept of cognitive complexity in software.
Cognitive complexity was already a concept in psychology, however, it is now used in the tech industry too. It is a level of difficulty in understanding a given piece of code which could be a function, class, or issue.
A non-understandable code is a dead code.
Cognitive complexity is an important implication for code quality and maintainability. The more complexity of the code, the higher the chances of bugs and errors during modifications. This can lower the developer productivity which further slows down the development process.
Nested loops, deeply nested conditionals, and intricate branching logic can result in difficulty in understanding the code.
Long functions or methods with multiple responses increase the cognitive load of the developers which makes it harder to understand the code. On the other hand, smaller, focused functions are generally easy to understand.
How the code is organized and structured directly affects how easily a developer can understand and navigate it. A well-structured code can make software easier to debug and maintain.
When external libraries are integrated with complex APIs, it can introduce cognitive complexity, when not used judiciously.
Documentation acts as a bridge between the code and the software development team's understanding of it. Insufficient or poorly written documentation can result in high cognitive complexity.
In this scenario, the code is relatively simple and easy to understand. The code adheres to the coding standards, follows best practices, and no unnecessary complexities are included. A few examples are Simple algorithms, straightforward functions, and well-structured classes.
The code is slightly more complex and may require further efforts to understand and modify it. While it includes some areas of complexity that can be addressed but still manageable. For example, Function with multiple levels of nested loops and moderately complex algorithm.
At a high complexity level, the code is highly complex and difficult to understand. This makes the code more prone to errors and bugs and difficult to maintain and modify. This further increases the cognitive load of the developers. Complex algorithms with multiple layers of recursion and classes with a high number of interconnected methods are some examples.
Too much coupling between modules or poor separations of concerns are some of the wrong architectural decisions that can take place. Inadequate or intricate architectural choices can lead to higher cognitive complexity in software. This can further contribute to technical debt which can result in spending more time fixing issues and directly impact the system’s performance.
There may be many instances when developers are unfamiliar with technologies or have insufficient understanding of the industry for which software is developed. This can result in high cognitive complexity as there is a lack of knowledge regarding the development process.
Another instance could be when the software engineering team struggles with making sound architecture decisions or doesn’t follow coding guidelines.
Although large pieces of code including classes, functions, or modules aren’t necessarily complex. However, their increase in length may be a cause of high cognitive complexity.
In other words, more code = higher chances of cognitive complexity. It is because they are more prone to bugs and fixing issues. It can also increase the cognitive load of the developers since they have to comprehend large functions which will be more time-consuming.
Aging or poorly maintained code can be challenging for the software engineering team to understand, update, or extend. This is because these codebases are usually outdated or aren’t documented properly. Moreover, they may also lack security features and protocols that make them more susceptible to security vulnerabilities and breaches. Outdated code can also pose integrating challenges.
Essential complexity is a type of complexity that is intrinsic to the domain the developers are working on. It is an inherent difficulty of a problem software is trying to solve, regardless of how the problem is implemented or represented. This makes the underlying problem harder to grasp as the developers have to resort to heavy abstractions and intricate patterns. Hence, resulting in high cognitive complexity.
When the names in the code are deduced from their purpose and role or don’t provide clarity, it hinders the smooth navigation of the code. But that’s not all! Comments that are riddled with abbreviations, jargon, or incomplete also don’t provide clarity and add an unnecessary layer of mental effort for the development team to understand it.
This metric calculates the average code changes (In lines of code) of a PR. The larger the size, the higher the chances of complex changes.
Cyclomatic complexity measures the number of linearly independent paths through a function or module. Higher cyclomatic complexity indicates the investigation of potentially challenging code sections.
It calculates the average number of comments per PR review. Review depth highlights the quality of the review and how thorough reviews are done and helps in identifying potentially complex sections before they get merged into the codebase.
Code churn doesn’t directly measure cognitive complexity. But, it tracks the number of times a code segment is modified. This suggests potential complexity due to differences in understanding or frequent adaption.
This metric measures the depth of nested structures within code including loops and conditionals. The higher the nesting complexity, the harder it is to understand the code. Nesting complexity helps in identifying areas that are needed for simplification and refactoring.
It analyzes various aspects of code including operators and operands. This helps in estimating cognitive efforts and offers an overall complexity score. However, this metric doesn’t directly map to human understanding.
Static analysis tools such as Sonarqube take a unique approach to measuring cognitive complexity compared to many other static analysis tools. It incorporates various factors to provide a real assessment of the difficulty of the code such as control flow complexity, code smells, and human assessment. Based on all these factors, a cognitive complexity score is calculated for each function and class in the codebase.
Apply refactoring techniques such as extracting methods or simplifying complex logic to improve code structure and clarity.
Adhere to coding principles such as KISS (Keep it short and simple) and DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) to increase the overall quality of code and reduce cognitive complexity.
As mentioned above, Static analysis tools are a great way to identify potentially complex functions and code smells that contribute to cognitive load. Through cognitive complexity score, developers can get to know the readability and maintainability of their code.
By fostering an open communication culture, teammates can discuss code designs and complexity with each other. Moreover, reviewing and refactoring code together helps in maintaining clarity and consistency.
Typo’s automated code tool not only enables developers to catch issues related to maintainability, readability, and potential bugs but also can detect code smells. It identifies issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master. This means less time reviewing and more time for important tasks. It keeps the code error-free, making the whole process faster and smoother.
Key Features
Understanding and addressing cognitive complexity is key to ensuring code quality and developer efficiency. By recognizing its causes and adopting strategies to reduce them, development teams can mitigate cognitive complexity and streamline the development process.
Code review is all about improving the code quality. However, it can be a nightmare for engineering managers and developers when not done correctly. They may experience several code review challenges and slow down the entire development process.Hence, following code review best practices to promote collaboration, improve code readability, and foster a positive team culture is crucial.
There are two types of code reviews: 1. Formal code review and 2. Lightweight code review.
As the name suggests, formal code reviews are based on a formal and structured process to find defects in code, specifications, and designs. It follows a set of established guidelines and involves multiple reviewers.
The most popular form of formal code review is Fagan Inspection. It consists of six steps: Planning, overview meeting, preparation, inspection meeting, casual analysis, reworking, and follow-up.
However, the downside of this type is that it is more time-consuming and resource-intensive than other types of code review.
Such a type of code review is commonly used by the development team and not testers. It is mostly followed when code review is not life-threatening. In other words, when reviewing a code doesn’t impact the software quality to a great extent.
There are four subtypes of lightweight code review:
This can also be known as pair programming. In this type, two developers work together on the same computer where one is writing code while the other is reviewing it in real time. Such a type is highly interactive and helps in knowledge sharing and spotting bugs.
In synchronous code review, the author produces the code themselves and asks the reviewer for feedback immediately when done with coding. The coder and reviewer then discuss and improve the code together. It involves direct communication and helps in keeping the discussion real around the code.
While it is similar to synchronous code review, the only difference is that the code authors and reviewers don’t have to look at the code at the same moment. It is usually an ideal choice among developers because it allows flexibility and is beneficial for developers who work across various time zones.
This type works for very specific situations. In this, different roles are assigned to the reviewers. It helps in more in-depth reviews and gives various perspectives. For team code reviews: code review tools, version control systems, and collaboration platforms are used.
Choose the correct code review type based on your team’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the factors unique to your organization.
Code review checklists include a predetermined set of questions and rules that the team will follow during the code review process. A few of the necessary quality checks include:
Apart from this, answer three questions in your mind while reviewing the code. It includes:
This allows you to know what to look for in a code review, streamline the code review, and focus on priorities.
The code review process must be an opportunity for growth and knowledge sharing rather than a critique of developers’ abilities.
To have effective code reviews, It is vital to create a culture of collaboration and learning. It includes encouraging pair programming so that developers can learn from each other and less experienced members can learn from their senior leaders.
You can establish code review guidelines that emphasize constructive feedback, respect, and empathy. Ensure that you communicate the goals of the code review and specify the roles and responsibilities of reviewers and authors of the code.
This allows the development team to know the purpose behind code review and take it as a way to improve their coding abilities and skills.
One of the code review practices is to provide feedback that is specific, honest, and actionable. Constructive feedback is important in building rapport with your software development team.
The feedback should point out the right direction rather than a confusion. It could be in the form of suggestions, highlighting potential issues, or pointing out blind spots.
Make sure that you explain the ‘Why’ behind your feedback so that it reduces the need for follow-ups and gives the necessary context. When writing comments, it should be written clearly and concisely.
This helps in improving the skills of software developers and producing better code which further results in a high-quality codebase.
Instead of focusing on all the changes altogether, focus on a small section to examine all aspects thoroughly. It is advisable to break them into small, manageable chunks to identify potential issues and offer suggestions for improvement.
Focusing on a small section lets reviewers examine all aspects thoroughly (Use a code review checklist). Smaller the PRs, developers can understand code changes in a short amount of time and reviewers can provide more focused and detailed reviews. Each change is given the attention it deserves and easier to adhere to the style guide.
This helps in a deeper understanding of the code’s impact on the overall project.
According to Goodhart’s law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
To measure the effectiveness of code review, have a few tangible goals so that it gives a quantifiable picture of how your code is improving. Have a few metrics in mind to determine the efficiency of your review and analyze the impact of the change in the process.
You can use SMART criteria and start with external metrics to get the bigger picture of how your code quality is increasing. Other than this, below are a few internal key metrics that must be kept in mind:
Besides this, you can use metrics-driven code review tools to decide in advance the goals and how to measure the effectiveness.
As mentioned above, don’t review the code all at once. Keep these three things in mind:
This is because reviewing the code continuously can drop off the focus and attention to detail. This further makes it less effective and invites burnout.
Hence, conduct code review sessions often and in short sessions. Encourage few breaks in between and set boundaries otherwise, defects may go unnoticed and the purpose of the code review process remains unfulfilled.
Relying on the same code reviewers consistently is a common challenge that can cause burnout. This can negatively impact the software development process in the long run.
Hence, encourage a rotation approach i.e. different team members can participate in reviewing the code. This brings in various skill sets and experience levels which promotes cross learning and a well-rounded review process. It also provides different points of view to get better solutions and fewer blind spots.
With this approach, team members can be familiar with different parts of the codebase, avoid bias in the review process, and understand each other's coding styles.
Documenting code review decisions is a great way to understand the overall effectiveness of the code review process. Ensure that you record and track the code review outcome for future reference. It is because this documentation makes it easier for those who may work on the codebase in the future.
It doesn’t matter if the review type is instant or synchronous.
Documentation provides insights into the reasoning behind certain choices, designs, and modifications. It helps in keeping historical records i.e. changes made over time, reasons for those changes, and any lessons learned during the review process. Besides this, it accelerates the onboarding process for new joiners.
As a result, documentation and tracking of the code review decisions encourage the continuous improvement culture within the development team.
Emphasizing coding standards promotes consistency, readability, maintainability, and overall code quality.
Personal preferences vary widely among developers. Hence, by focusing on coding standards, team members can limit subjective arguments and rather rely on documented agreed-upon code review guidelines. It helps in addressing potential issues early in the development process and ensures the codebase remains consistent over time.
Besides this, adhering to coding standards makes it easier to scale development efforts and add new features and components seamlessly.
Code review is a vital process yet it can be time-consuming. Hence, automate what can be automated.
Use code review tools like Typo to help improve the code quality and increase the level of speed, precision, and consistency. This allows reviewers to take more time in giving valuable feedback, automate, track changes, and enable easy collaboration. It also ensures that the changes don’t break existing functionality and streamline the development process.
Typo’s automated code review tool identifies issues in your code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master. This means less time reviewing and more time for important tasks. It keeps your code error-free, making the whole process faster and smoother.
If you prioritize the code review process, do follow the above-mentioned best practices. These code review best practices maximize the quality of the code, improve the team’s productivity, and streamline the development process.
Happy reviewing!
The code review process is vital to the software development life cycle. It helps improve code quality and minimizes technical debt by addressing potential issues in the early stages.
Due to its many advantages, many teams have adopted code review as an important practice. However, it can be a reason for frustration and disappointment too which can further damage the team atmosphere and slow down the entire process. Hence, the code review process should be done with the right approach and mindset.
In this blog post, we will delve into common mistakes that should be avoided while performing code reviews.
Performing code review helps in identifying areas of improvement in the initial stages. It also helps in code scalability i.e. whether the code can handle increased loads and user interactions efficiently. Besides this, it allows junior developers and interns to gain the right feedback and hone their coding skills. This, altogether, helps in code optimization.
Code reviews allow maintaining code easily even when the author is unavailable. It lets multiple people be aware of the code logic and functionality and allows them to follow consistent coding standards. The code review process also helps in identifying opportunities for refactoring and eliminating redundancy. It also acts as a quality gate to ensure that the code is consistent, clear, and well-documented.
The code review process provides mutual learning to both reviewers and developers. It not only allows them to gain insights but also to understand each other perspectives. For newbies, they get an idea of why certain things are done in a certain way. It includes the architecture of the application, naming conventions, conventions of structuring code within a class, and many more.
Performing code reviews helps in maintaining consistent coding styles and best practices across the organization. It includes formatting, code structure, naming conventions, and many more. Besides this, code review is often integrated with the dev workflow. Hence, it cannot be merged into the main code base without passing through the code review process.
While code review is a tedious task, it saves developers time in fixing bugs after the product’s release. A lack of a code review process can increase flaws and inconsistencies in code. It also increases the quality of code which are more maintainable and less prone to errors. Further, it streamlines the development process and reduces technical debt which saves significant time and effort to resolve later.
Code reviewers do provide feedback. Yet, most of the time they are neither clear nor actionable. This not only leads to delays and ambiguity but also slows down the entire development process.
For example, if the reviewer adds a comment ‘Please change it’ without giving any further guidance or suggestion. The code author may take it in many different ways. They may implement the same according to their understanding or sometimes they don’t have enough expertise to make changes.
Unfortunately, it is one of the most common mistakes made by the reviewers.
These suggestions will allow code authors to understand the reviewer’s perspective and make necessary changes.
The review contains a variety of tests such as unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, and many more. It gets difficult to review all of them which lets reviewers skim through them and jump straight to implementations and conclusions.
This not only eludes the code review process but also puts the entire project at risk. The reasons behind not reviewing the tests are many including time-constraint and not understanding the signs of robust testing and not prioritizing it.
Skipping tests is a common mistake by reviewers. It is time-consuming for sure, but it comes bearing a lot of benefits too.
Another common mistake is only reviewing changed lines of code. Code review is an ever-evolving process that goes through various phases of change.
Old lines are deleted accidentally or ignored because for obvious reasons can be troublemakers. Reviewing only newly added codes overlooks the interconnected nature of a codebase and results in missing specific details that can further, jeopardize the whole project.
Always review existing and newly added codes together to evaluate how new changes might affect existing functionality.
A proper code review process needs both time and peace. The rushed review may result in poorly written code and hinder the process's efficiency. Reviewing code before the demo, release, or deadline are a few reasons behind rushed reviews.
During rush reviews, code reviewers read the code lines rather than reading the code through lines. It usually happens when reviewers are too familiar with the code. Hence, they examine by just skimming through the code.
It not only results in missing out on fine and subtle mistakes but also compromises coding standards and security vulnerabilities.
Rush reviews should be avoided at any cost. Use the suggestions to help in reviewing the code efficiently.
It is the responsibility of the reviewer to examine the entire code - From design and language to mechanism and operations. However, most of the time, reviewers focus only on the functionality and operationality of the code. They do not go much into designing and architecture part.
It could either be due to limited time or a rush to meet deadlines. However, it may demand close consideration and observation to look into the design and architecture side to understand how it ties in with what’s already there.
Focusing on design and architecture ensures a holistic assessment of the codebase, fostering long-term maintainability and alignment with overall project goals.
A code review checklist is important while doing code reviews. Without the checklist, the process is directionless. Not only this, reviewers may unintentionally overlook vital elements, lack consistency, and miss certain aspects of code. Not using the checklist may confuse whether all the aspects are covered as well and key best practices, coding standards, and security considerations may be neglected.
Behind effective code reviews is a checklist that involves every task that needs to be ticked off.
A code review should not include cosmetic concerns; it will efficiently use time. Use a tool to manage these concerns, which can be predefined with well-defined coding style guides.
For further reference, here are some cosmetic concerns:
Functional flaws of the code should not be reviewed separately as this leads to loss of time and manual repetition. The reviewer can instead trust automated testing pipelines to carry out this task.
Enforcing coding standards and generating review notifications should also be automated, as repetitive tasks enhance efficiency.
As a code reviewer, base your reviews on the established team and organizational coding standards. Imposing the coding standards that reviewers personally follow should not serve as a baseline for the reviews.
Reviewing a code can sometimes lead to the practice of striving for perfection. Overanalyzing the code can lead to this. Instead, as a code reviewer, focus on improving readability and following the best practices.
Another common mistake is that reviewers don’t follow up after reviewing. Following up is important to address feedback, implement changes, and resolve any issues identified.
The lack of follow-up actions is also because reviewers assume that identified issues will be resolved. In most cases it does, but still, they need to ensure that the issues are addressed as per the standard and in the correct way.
It leads to accountability gaps, and unclear expectations, and the problems may persist even after reviewing negatively impacting code quality.
Lack of follow-up actions may lead to no improvements or outcomes. Hence, it is an important practice that needs to be followed in every organization.
Typo’s automated code review tool identifies issues in your code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master. This means less time reviewing and more time for important tasks. It keeps your code error-free, making the whole process faster and smoother.
The code review process is an important aspect of the software development process. However, when not done correctly, it can negatively impact the project.
Follow the above-mentioned suggestions for the common mistakes to not let these few mistakes negatively impact the software quality.
Happy reviewing!
Research and Development (R&D) has become the hub of innovation and competitiveness in the dynamic world of modern business. A deliberate and perceptive strategy is required to successfully navigate the financial complexities of R&D expenses.
When done carefully, the process of capitalizing R&D expenses has the potential to produce significant benefits. In this blog, we dive into the cutting-edge R&D cost capitalization techniques that go beyond the obvious, offering practical advice to improve your financial management skills.
Capitalizing R&D costs is a legitimate accounting method that involves categorizing software R&D expenses, such as FTE wages and software licenses, as investments rather than immediate expenditures. Put more straightforwardly, it means you're not merely spending money; instead, you're making an investment in the future of your company.
Capitalizing on R&D costs entails a smart transformation of expenditures into strategic assets supporting a company's financial structure beyond a simple transaction. While traditional methods follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), it is wise to investigate advanced strategies.
One such strategy is activity-based costing, which establishes a clear connection between costs and particular R&D stages. This fine-grained understanding of cost allocation improves capitalization accuracy while maximizing resource allocation wisdom. Additionally, more accurate appraisals of R&D investments can be produced using contemporary valuation techniques suited to your sector's dynamics.
This is to be noted that only some expenditures can be converted into assets. GAAP guidelines are explicit about what qualifies for cost capitalization in software development. R&D must adhere to specific conditions to be recognized as an asset on the balance sheet. These include:
The capitalizable cost should be contributing to a tangible product or process.
The firm’s commitment should evolve into a well-defined plan. The half-hearted endeavors should be eliminated.
Projections for market entry and the product must yield financial returns in the future.
In software development costs, GAAP’s FASB Account Standard Codification ASC Topic 350 - Intangibles focuses on internal use only software eligible for capitalization:
That being said, FASB Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) Topic 985 – Software addresses sellable software for external use. It covers:
Note that, costs related to initial planning and prototyping cannot be capitalized. Therefore, they are not exempted from tax calculations.
In R&D capitalization, tech companies typically capitalize on engineering compensation, product owners, third-party platforms, algorithms, cloud services, and development tools.
Although, In some cases, an organization's acquisition targets may also be capitalized and amortized.
Enhancing your understanding of R&D cost capitalization necessitates adopting techniques beyond quantitative data to offer a comprehensive view of your investments. These tools transform numerical data into tactical choices, emphasizing the critical importance of data-driven insights.
Adopt tools that are strengthened by advanced analytics and supported by artificial intelligence (AI) prowess to assess the prospects of each R&D project carefully. This thorough review enables the selection of initiatives with greater capitalization potential, ultimately optimizing the investment portfolio. Additionally, these technologies act as catalysts for resource allocation consistent with overarching strategic goals.
In Typo, you can use “Investment distribution” to allocate time, money, and effort across different work categories or projects for a given period of time. Investment distribution helps you optimize your resource allocation and drive your dev efforts towards areas of maximum business impact.
These insights can be used to evaluate project feasibility, resource requirements, and potential risks. You can allocate your engineering team better to drive maximum deliveries.
Effective amortization is the trajectory, while capitalization serves as the launchpad, defining intelligent financial management. For amortization goals, distinguishing between the various R&D components necessitates nothing less than painstaking thought.
Advanced techniques emphasize personalization by calibrating amortization periods to correspond to the lifespan of specific R&D assets. Shorter amortization periods are beckoned by ventures with higher risk profiles, reflecting the uncertainty they carry. Contrarily, endeavors that have predictable results last for a longer time. This customized method aligns costs with the measurable gains realized from each R&D project, improving the effectiveness of financial management.
R&D cost capitalization should be tailored to the specific dynamics of each industry, taking into account the specifics of each sector. Combining agile approaches with capitalization strategies yields impressive returns in industries like technology, known for their creativity and flexibility.
Capitalization strategies dynamically alter when real-time R&D progress is tracked using agile frameworks like Scrum or Kanban. This realignment makes sure that the moving projects are depicted financially accurately. Your strategy adapts to the contextual limits of the business by using industry-specific performance measures, highlighting returns within those parameters.
Controlling the complexities of R&D financial management necessitates an ongoing voyage marked by the fusion of approaches, tools, and insights specific to the sector. Combining the methods presented here results in a solid framework that fosters creativity while maximizing financial success.
It is crucial to understand that the adaptability of advanced R&D cost capitalization defines it. Your journey is shaped by adapting techniques, being open to new ideas, and being skilled at navigating industry vagaries. This path promotes innovation and prosperity in the fiercely competitive world of contemporary business and grants mastery over R&D financials.
A well-organized and systematic approach must be in place to guarantee the success of your software development initiatives. The Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), which offers a structure for converting concepts into fully functional software, can help.
Adopting cutting-edge SDLC best practices that improve productivity, security, and overall project performance is essential in the cutthroat world of software development. The seven core best practices that are essential for achieving excellence in software development are covered in this guide. These practices ensure that your projects always receive the most optimal results. Let’s dive into the seven SDLC best practices.
This is an essential step for development teams. A thorough planning and requirement analysis phase forms the basis of any successful software project.
Start by defining the scope and objectives of the project. Keep a thorough record of your expectations, limitations, and ambitions. This guarantees everyone is on the same page and lessens the possibility of scope creep.
Engage stakeholders right away. Understanding user wants and expectations greatly benefits from their feedback. Refinement of needs is assisted by ongoing input and engagement with stakeholders.
Conduct thorough market research to support your demand analysis. Recognize the preferences of your target market and the amount of competition in the market. This information influences the direction and feature set of your project.
Make a thorough strategy that includes due dates, milestones, and resource allocation. Your team will be more effective if you have a defined strategy that serves as a road map so that each member is aware of their duties and obligations. Also, ensure that there is effective communication within the team so that everyone is aligned with the project plan.
Agile methodologies, which promote flexibility and teamwork, such as Scrum and Kanban, have revolutionized software development. In the agile model, the team members are the heartbeat of this whole process. It fosters an environment that embraces collaboration and adaptability.
Apply a strategy that enables continual development. Thanks to this process, agile team members can respond to shifting requirements and incrementally add value.
Teams made up of developers, testers, designers, and stakeholders should be cross-functional. Collaboration across diverse skill sets guarantees faster progress and more thorough problem-solving.
Implement regular sprint reviews during which the team displays its finished products to the stakeholders. The project will continue to align with shifting requirements because of this feedback loop.
Use agile project management tools like Jira or Trello to aid in sprint planning, backlog management, and real-time collaboration. These tools enhance transparency and expedite agile processes.
Security is vitally important in today's digital environment as a rise in security issues can result in negative consequences. Hence, adopting security best practices ensures prioritizing security measures and mitigating risks.
Early on in the development phase, a threat modeling step should be conducted, and you should approach potential security risks and weaknesses head-on. It helps in identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
Integrate continuous security testing into the whole SDLC. Integrated components should include both manual penetration testing and automated security scanning. Security flaws must be found and fixed as soon as possible.
Keep up with recent developments and security threats. Participate in security conferences, subscribe to security newsletters, and encourage your personnel to take security training frequently.
Analyze and protect any third-party libraries and parts used in your product. Leaving third-party code vulnerabilities unfixed can result in serious problems.
For timely software delivery, effective development and deployment process is crucial. Not only this, software testing plays a crucial role in ensuring the quality and application of the software.
Automate code testing, integration, and deployment with continuous integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. As a result, the release cycle is sped up, errors are decreased, and consistent software quality is guaranteed. Application security testing can be seamlessly integrated into CI/CD pipelines to mitigate security vulnerabilities during the testing phase.
Use orchestration with Kubernetes and tools like Docker to embrace containerization. Containers isolate dependencies, guaranteeing consistency throughout the development process.
To manage and deploy infrastructure programmatically, apply Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles. Automating server provisioning with programs like Terraform and Ansible may ensure consistency and reproducibility.
A/B testing and feature flags are important components of your software development process. These methods enable you to gather user feedback, roll out new features to a select group of users, and base feature rollout choices on data.
Software must follow stringent testing requirements and approved coding standards to be trusted.
Compliance with industry-specific regulations and standards is crucial, and adherence to these standards should be a priority so that the final product meets all necessary compliance criteria.
To preserve code quality and encourage knowledge sharing, regular code reviews should be mandated. Use static code analysis tools to identify potential problems early.
A large collection of automated tests should encompass unit, integration, and regression testing. Automating the process of making code modifications can prevent new problems from arising.
To monitor the evolution of your codebase over time, create metrics for code quality. The reliability, security, and maintainability of a piece of code can be determined using SonarQube and other technologies.
Use load testing as part of your testing process to ensure your application can manage the expected user loads. The next step is performance tuning after load testing. Performance optimization must be continuous to improve your application's responsiveness and resource efficiency.
For collaboration and knowledge preservation in software teams, efficient documentation and version control are essential.
Use version control systems like Git to manage codebase changes methodically. Use branching approaches to create well-organized teams.
Maintain up-to-date user manuals and technical documentation. These tools promote transparency while facilitating efficient maintenance and knowledge transfer.
The use of "living documentation" techniques, which automatically treat documentation like code and generate it from source code comments, is something to consider. This guarantees that the documentation is current when the code is developed.
Establish for your teams a clear Git workflow that considers code review procedures and branching models like GitFlow. Collaboration is streamlined by using consistent version control procedures.
Long-term success depends on your software operating at its best and constantly improving.
Testing should be integrated into your SDLC. To improve resource utilization, locate and fix bottlenecks. Assessments of scalability, load, and stress are essential.
To acquire insights into application performance implement real-time monitoring and logging as part of your deployment process. Proactive issue detection reduces the possibility of downtime and meets user expectations.
Identify methods for gathering user input. User insights enable incremental improvements by adapting your product to changing user preferences.
Implement error tracking and reporting technologies to get more information about program crashes and errors. Maintaining a stable and dependable software system depends on promptly resolving these problems.
Software development lifecycle methodologies are structured frameworks used by software development teams to navigate the SDLC.
There are various SDLC methodologies. Each has its own unique approach and set of principles. Check below:
According to this model, software development flows linearly through various phases: requirements, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. There is no overlapping and any phase can only initiate when the previous one is complete.
Although, DevOps is not traditionally an SDLC methodology, but a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. DevOps' objective is to shorten the software development lifecycle and enhance the relevance of the software based on users' feedback.
Although it has been mentioned above, Agile methodology breaks a project down into various cycles. Each of them passes through some or all SDLC phases. This methodology also incorporates users' feedback throughout the project.
It is an early precursor to Agile and emphasizes iterative and incremental action. The iterative model is beneficial for large and complex applications.
An extension of the waterfall model, this model is named after its two key concepts: Validation and Verification. It involves testing and validation in each software development phase so that it is closely aligned with testing and quality assurance activities.
Technical expertise and process improvement are required on the route to mastering advanced SDLC best practices. These techniques can help firms develop secure, scalable, high-quality software solutions. Due to their originality, dependability, and efficiency, these solutions satisfy the requirements of the contemporary business environment.
If your company adopts best practices, it can position itself well for future growth and competitiveness. By taking software development processes to new heights, one can discover that superior software leads to superior business performance.
Code reviews are the cornerstone of ensuring code quality, fostering a collaborative relationship between developers, and identifying potential code issues in the primitive stages.
To do this well and optimize the code review process, a code review checklist is essential. It can serve as an invaluable tool to streamline evaluations and guide developers.
Let’s explore what you should include in your code reviews and how to do it well.
50% of the companies spend 2-5 hours weekly on code reviews. You can streamline this process with a checklist, and developers save time. Here are eight criteria for you to check for while conducting your code reviews with a code review tool or manually. It will help to ensure effective code reviews that optimize both time and code quality.
A complicated code is not helpful to anyone. Therefore, while reviewing code, you must ensure readability and maintainability. This is the first criterion and cannot be overstated enough.
The code must be orchestrated into well-defined modules, functions, and classes. Each of them must carry a unique role in the bigger picture. You can employ naming conventions for each component to convey its purpose, ensuring code changes are easily understood and the purpose of the different components at a glance.
A code with consistent indentation, spacing, and naming convention is easy to understand. To do this well, you should enforce a standard format that minimizes friction between team members who have their own coding styles. This will ensure a consistent code across the team.
By adding in-line comments and documentation throughout the code, you will help explain the complex logic, algorithms, and business rules. Coders can use this opportunity to explain the ‘why’ behind the coding decisions and not only explain ‘how’ something is done. It adds context and makes the code-rich in information. When your codebase is understandable to the current team members and future developers who would handle it – you pave the way for effective collaboration and long-standing code. Hence, facilitating actionable feedback and smoother code change.
No building is secure without a solid foundation – the same logic applies to a codebase. The code reviewer has to check for scalability and sustainability, and a solid architectural design is imperative.
Partition of the code into logical layers encompassing presentation, business logic, and data storage. This modular structure enables easy code maintenance, updates, and debugging.
In software development, design patterns are a valuable tool for addressing recurring challenges consistently and efficiently. Developers can use established patterns to avoid unnecessary work, focus on unique aspects of a problem, and ensure reliable and maintainable solutions. A pattern-based approach is especially crucial in large-scale projects, where consistency and efficiency are critical for success.
Code reviews have to ensure meticulous testing and quality assurance processes. This is done to maintain high test coverage and quality standards.
When you test your code, it's essential to ensure that all crucial functionalities are accounted for and that your tests provide comprehensive coverage.
You should explore extreme scenarios and boundary conditions to identify hidden problems and ensure your code behaves as expected in all situations, meeting the highest quality standards.
Ensuring security and performance in your source code is crucial in the face of rising cyber threats and digital expansion, making valuable feedback a vital part of the process.
Scrutinize the user inputs that check for security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection. Check for the input of validation techniques to prevent malicious inputs that can compromise the application.
If the code performance becomes a bottleneck, your application will suffer. Code reviews should look at the possible bottlenecks and resource-intensive operations. You can utilize the profiling tools to identify them and look at the sections of the code that are possibly taking up more resources and could slow down the application.
When code reviews check security and performance well, your software becomes effective against potential threats.
OOAD principles offer the pathway for a robust and maintainable code. As a code reviewer, ensuring the code follows them is essential.
When reviewing code, aim for singular responsibilities. Look for clear and specific classes that aren't overloaded. Encourage developers to break down complex tasks into manageable chunks. This leads to code that's easy to read, debug, and maintain. Focus on guiding developers towards modular and comprehensible code to improve the quality of your reviews.
It's important to ensure that derived classes can seamlessly replace base classes without affecting consistency and adaptability. To ensure this, it's crucial to adhere to the Liskov Substitution Principle and verify that derived classes uphold the same contract as their base counterparts. This allows for greater flexibility and ease of use in your code.
Beyond mere functionality, non-functional requirements define a codebase's true mettle:
While reviewing code, you should ensure the code is self-explanatory and digestible for all fellow developers. The code must have meaningful variable and function names, abstractions applied as needed, and without any unnecessary complications.
When it comes to debugging, you should carefully ensure the right logging is inserted. Check for log messages that offer context and information that can help identify any issues that may arise.
A codebase should be adaptable to any environment as needed, and a code reviewer has to check for the same.
A code reviewer should ensure the configuration values are not included within the code but are placed externally. This allows for easy modifications and ensures that configuration values are stored in environment variables or configuration files.
A code should ideally perform well and consistently across diverse platforms. A reviewer must check if the code is compatible across operating systems, browsers, and devices.When the code can perform well under different environments, it improves its longevity and versatility.
The final part of code reviewers is to ensure the process results in better collaboration and more learning for the coder.
Good feedback helps the developer in their growth. It is filled with specific, actionable insights that empower developers to correct their coding process and enhance their work.
Code reviews should be knowledge-sharing platforms – it has to include sharing of insights, best practices, and innovative techniques for the overall developer of the team.
A code reviewer must ensure that certain best practices are followed to ensure effective code reviews and maintain clean code:
Hard coding shouldn’t be a part of any code. Instead, it should be replaced by constants and configuration values that enhance adaptability. You should verify if the configuration values are centralized for easy updates and if error-prone redundancies are reduced.
The comments shared across the codebase must focus on problem-solving and help foster understanding among teammates.
Complicated if/else blocks and switch statements should be replaced by succinct, digestible frameworks. As a code reviewer, you can check if the repetitive logic is condensed into reusable functions that improve code maintainability and reduce cognitive load.
A code review should not include cosmetic concerns; it will efficiently use your time. Use a tool to manage these concerns, which can be predefined with well-defined coding style guides.
For further reference, here are some cosmetic concerns:
Functional flaws of the code should not be reviewed separately as this leads to loss of time and manual repetition. The reviewer can instead trust automated testing pipelines to carry out this task.
Enforcing coding standards and generating review notifications should also be automated, as repetitive tasks enhance efficiency.
As a code reviewer, you should base your reviews on the established team and organizational coding standards. Imposing the coding standards that you personally follow should not serve as a baseline for the reviews.
Reviewing a code can sometimes lead to the practice of striving for perfection. Overanalyzing the code can lead to this. Instead, as a code reviewer, you can focus on improving readability and following the best practices.
The process of curating the best code review checklist lies in ensuring alignment of readability, architectural finesse, and coding best practices with quality assurance. Hence, promoting code consistency within development teams.
This enables reviewers to approve code that performs well, enhances the software, and helps the coder in their career path. This collaborative approach paves the way for learning and harmonious dynamics within the team.
Typo, an intelligent engineering platform, can help in identifying SDLC metrics. It can also help in detecting blind spots which can ensure improved code quality.
Agile practices enable businesses with adaptability and help elevate their levels of collaboration and innovation. Especially when changing landscapes in tech, agile working models are a cornerstone for businesses in navigating through it all.
Therefore, agile team working agreements are crucial to successfully understand what fuels this collaboration. They serve as the blueprint for agile team members and enable teams to function in tandem.
In this blog, we discuss the importance of working agreements, best practices, and more.
Agile teams are a fundamental component of agile development methodologies. These are cross-functional teams of individuals responsible for executing agile projects.
The team size is usually ranging from 5 to 9 members. It is chosen deliberately to foster collaboration, effective communication, and flexibility. They are autonomous and self-organizing teams that prioritize customer needs and continuous improvement. Often guided by an agile coach, they can deliver incrementally and adapt to changing circumstances.
Agile team working agreements are guidelines that outline how an agile team should operate. They dictate the norms of communication and decision-making processes and define quality benchmarks.
This team agreement facilitates a shared understanding and manages expectations, fostering a culture aligned with Agile values and team norms. This further enables collaboration across teams. In the B2B landscape, such collaboration is essential as intricate projects require several experts in cross-functional teams to work harmoniously together towards a shared goal.
Agile Team Working Agreements are crucial for defining specific requirements and rules for cooperation. Let's explore some further justifications for why they are vital:
Working agreements can aid in fostering openness and communication within the team. When everyone is on the same page on how to collaborate, productivity and efficiency rise.
Agile Team Working Agreements can encourage a culture of continuous improvement because team members can review and amend the agreement over time.
Working agreements should be a collaborative process to involve the entire team and get different perspectives. Here are some steps to follow:
Gather all team members; the scrum master, product owner, and all other stakeholders.
Once you have the team, encourage everyone to share their thoughts and ideas about the team, the working styles, and the dynamics within the team. Ask them for areas of improvement and ensure the Scrum Master guides the conversation for a more streamlined flow in the meeting.
During retrospectives, identify the challenges or issues from the previous sprints. Discuss how they propose to solve such challenges from coming up again through the working agreements.
Once you’ve heard the challenges and suggestions, propose the potential solutions you can implement through the working agreements and ensure your team is on board with them. These agreements must support the team‘s goals and improve collaboration.
Write the agreed-upon working agreements clearly in a document. Make sure the document is accessible to all the team members physically or as a digital resource.
To create effective working agreements, you must also know what goes into it and the different aspects to cover. Here are five components to be included in the agreement.
Outline how you would like the decorum of the team members to be – this will ensure the culture of the team and company is consistently upheld. Nurture a culture of active listening, collaborative ideation, and commitment to their work. Ensure professionalism is mentioned.
Once you have the team, encourage everyone to share their thoughts and ideas about the team, the working styles, and the dynamics within the team. Ask them for areas of improvement and ensure the Scrum Master guides the conversation for a more streamlined flow in the meeting.
Establish communication guidelines, including but not limited to preferred channels, frequencies, and etiquette, to ensure smooth conversations. Clear communication is the linchpin of successful product building and thus makes it an essential component.
Set the tone for meetings with structured agendas, time management, and participation guidelines that enable productive discussions. Additionally, defining meeting times and duration helps synchronize schedules better.
Clear decision-making is crucial in B2B projects with multiple stakeholders. Transparency is critical to avoiding misunderstandings and ensuring everyone's needs and team goals are met.
To maintain a healthy work environment, encourage open communication and respectful disagreement. When conflicts arise, approach them constructively and find a solution that benefits all parties. Consider bringing in a neutral third party or establishing clear guidelines for conflict resolution. This helps complex B2B collaborations thrive.
It's essential to start with core guidelines that everyone can agree upon when drafting working agreements. These agreements can be improved as a team grows older, laying a solid foundation for difficult B2B cooperation. Team members can concentrate on what's essential and prevent confusion or misunderstandings by keeping things simple.
Involving all team members in formulating the working agreements is crucial to ensuring everyone is committed to them. This strategy fosters a sense of ownership and promotes teamwork. When working on B2B initiatives, inclusivity provides a well-rounded viewpoint that can produce superior results.
To guarantee comprehension and consistency, a centralized document that is available to all team members must be maintained. This paperwork is very helpful in B2B partnerships because accountability is so important. Team members can operate more effectively and avoid misunderstandings by having a single source of truth.
Maintaining continued relevance requires routinely reviewing and revising agreements to reflect changing team dynamics. This agility is crucial in the constantly evolving B2B environment. Teams may maintain focus and ensure everyone is on the same page and working toward the same objectives by routinely reviewing agreements.
To guarantee seamless integration into the team's collaborative standards when new team members join a project, it's crucial to introduce them to the working agreements. Rapid onboarding is essential for B2B cooperation to keep the project moving forward. Teams can prevent delays and keep the project moving ahead by swiftly bringing new members up to speed.
The following essential qualities should be taken into account to foster teamwork through working agreements:
Be careful to display the agreements in a visible location in the workplace. This makes it easier to refer to established norms and align behaviors with them. Visible agreements provide constant reminders of the team's commitments. Feedback loops such as one-on-one meetings, and regular check-ins help ensure that these agreements are actively followed and adjusted, if needed.
Create agreements that are clear-cut and simple to grasp. All team members are more likely to obey and abide by clear and simple guidelines. Simpler agreements reduce ambiguity and uncertainty, hence fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Review and revise the agreements frequently to stay current with the changing dynamics of the team. The agreements' adaptability ensures that they will continue to be applicable and functional over time. Align it further with retrospective meetings; where teams can reflect on their processes and agreements as well as take note of blind spots.
Develop a sense of shared responsibility among team members to uphold the agreements they have made together. This shared commitment strengthens responsibility and respect for one another, ultimately encouraging collaboration.
Once you have created your working agreements, it is crucial to enforce them to see effective results.
Here are five strategies to enforce the working agreements.
Use automated tools to enforce the code-related aspects of working agreements. Automation ensures consistency reduces errors, and enhances efficiency in business-to-business projects.
Code reviews and retrospectives help reinforce the significance of teamwork agreements. These sessions support improvement. Serve as platforms for upholding established norms.
Foster a culture of peer accountability where team members engage in dialogues and provide feedback. This approach effectively integrates working agreements into day-to-day operations.
Incorporate check-ins, stand-up meetings, or retrospective meetings to discuss progress and address challenges. These interactions offer opportunities to rectify any deviations from established working agreements.
Acknowledge and reward team members who consistently uphold working agreements. Publicly recognizing their dedication fosters a sense of pride. Further promotes an environment.
Teams can greatly enhance their dedication to working agreements. Establish an atmosphere that fosters project collaboration and success by prioritizing these strategies.
Collaboration plays a role in B2B software development. Agile Team Working Agreements are instrumental in promoting collaboration. This guide highlights the significance of these agreements, explains how to create them, and offers practices for their implementation.
By crafting these agreements, teams establish an understanding and set expectations, ultimately leading to success. As teams progress, these agreements evolve through retrospectives and real-life experiences, fostering excellence, innovation, and continued collaboration.
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For every project, whether delivering a product feature or fulfilling a customer request, you want to reach your goal efficiently. But that’s not always simple – choosing the right method can become stressful. Whether you want to track the tasks through story points or hours, you should fully understand both of them well.
Therefore in this blog, story points vs. hours, we help you decide.
When it comes to Agile Software Development, accurately estimating the effort required for each task is crucial. To accomplish this, teams use Story Points, which are abstract units of measurement assigned to each project based on factors such as complexity, amount of work, risk, and uncertainty.
These points are represented by numerical values like 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 or by terms like X-Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra-Large. They do not represent actual hours but rather serve as a way for Scrum teams to think abstractly and reduce the stress of estimation. By avoiding actual hour estimates, teams can focus on delivering customer value and adapting to changes that may occur during the project.
When estimating the progress of a project, it's crucial to focus on the relative complexity of the work involved rather than just time. Story points help with this shift in perspective, providing a more accurate measure of progress.
By using this approach, collaboration and shared understanding among team members can be promoted, which allows for effective communication during estimation. Additionally, story points allow for adjustments and adaptability when dealing with changing requirements or uncertainties. By measuring historical velocity, they enable accurate planning and forecasting, encouraging velocity-based planning.
Overall, story points emphasize the team's collective effort rather than individual performance, providing feedback for continuous improvement.
Project management can involve various methodologies and estimating work in terms of hours. While this method can be effective for plan-driven projects with inflexible deadlines, it may not be suitable for projects that require adaptability and flexibility. For product companies, holding a project accountable has essential.
Hours provide stakeholders with a clear understanding of the time required to complete a project and enable them to set realistic expectations for deadlines. This encourages effective planning and coordination of resources, allocation of workloads, and creation of project schedules and timelines to ensure everyone is on the same page.
One of the most significant advantages of using hours-based estimates is that they are easy to understand and track progress. It provides stakeholders with a clear understanding of how much work has been done and how much time remains. By multiplying the estimated hours by the hourly rate of resources involved, project costs can be estimated accurately. This simplifies billing procedures when charging clients or stakeholders based on the actual hours. It also facilitates the identification of discrepancies between the estimated and actual hours, enabling the project manager to adjust the resources' allocation accordingly.
Estimating the time and effort required for a project can be daunting. The subjectivity of story points can make it challenging to compare and standardize estimates, leading to misunderstandings and misaligned expectations if not communicated clearly.
Furthermore, teams new to story points may face a learning curve in understanding the scale and aligning their estimations. The lack of a universal standard for story points can create confusion when working across different teams or organizations.Additionally, story points may be more abstract and less intuitive for stakeholders, making it difficult for them to grasp progress or make financial and timeline decisions based on points. It's important to ensure that all stakeholders understand the meaning and purpose of story points to ensure everything is understood.
Relying solely on hours may only sometimes be accurate, especially for complex or uncertain tasks where it's hard to predict the exact amount of time needed. This approach can also create a mindset of rushing through tasks, which can negatively affect quality and creativity.
Instead, promoting a collaborative team approach and avoiding emphasizing individual productivity can help teams excel better.
Additionally, hourly estimates may not account for uncertainties or changes in project scope, which can create challenges in managing unexpected events.
Lastly, sticking strictly to hours can limit flexibility and prevent the exploration of more efficient or innovative approaches, making it difficult to justify deviating from estimated hours.
It can be daunting to decide what works best for your team, and you don’t solely have to rely on one solution most of the time - use a hybrid approach instead.
When trying to figure out what tasks to tackle first, using story points can be helpful. They give you a good idea of how complex a high-level user story or feature is, which can help your team decide how to allocate resources. They are great for getting a big-picture view of the project's scope.
However, using hours might be a better bet when you're working on more detailed tasks or tasks with specific time constraints. Estimating based on hours can give you a much more precise measure of how much effort something will take, which is important for creating detailed schedules and timelines. It can also help you figure out which tasks should come first and ensure you're meeting any deadlines that are outside your team's control. By using both methods as needed, you'll be able to plan and prioritize more effectively.
Coding is a fundamental aspect of software development. Since an increase in the number of complex and high-profile security software projects, coding is becoming an important part of digital transformation as well.
But, there is a lot more to coding than just writing code and executing it. The developers must know how to write high-quality and clean code and maintain code consistency. As it not only enhances the software but also contributes to a more efficient development process.
This is why code quality tools are here to your rescue. But, before we suggest you some code quality tools, let’s first understand what ‘Low-quality code’ is and what metrics need to be kept in mind.
In simple words, low-quality code is like a poorly-written article.
An article that consists of grammatical errors and disorganized content which, unfortunately, fails to convey the information efficiently. Similarly, low-quality code is poorly structured and lacks adherence to coding best practices. Hence, fails to communicate logic and functions clearly.
This is why measuring code quality is important. The code quality tools consider the qualitative and quantitative metrics for reviewing the code.
Let’s take a look at the code metrics for code quality evolution below:
The code’s ability to perform error-free operations whenever it runs.
A good-quality code is easy to maintain i.e. adding new features in less time with less effort.
The same code can be used for other functions and software.
The code is portable when it can run in different environments without any error.
A code is of good quality when a smaller number of tests are required to verify it.
When the code is easily read and understood.
The good-quality code should be clear enough to be easily understood by other developers.
A well-documented code is when a code is both readable and maintainable i.e. Enabling other developers to understand and use it without much time and effort.
A good quality code takes less time to build and is easy to debug.
The extensible code can incorporate future changes and growth.
A soft sizing algorithm that breaks down your source code into various micro functions. The result is then interpolated into a single score.
The set of measures to evaluate the computational complexity of a software program. More the complexity, the lower the code quality.
It measures the structural complexity of the code. It is computed using the control flow graph of the program.
Static analysis code tools are software programs and scripts that analyze source or compiled code versions ensuring code quality and security.
Below are 5 best static code analysis tools you can try:
Typo’s automated code review tool identifies issues in your code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master. This means less time reviewing and more time for important tasks. It keeps your code error-free, making the whole process faster and smoother.
Key features:
A well-known static code analysis tool that enables you to write safer and cleaner code. It is an open-source package that finds different types of bugs, vulnerabilities, and issues in the code.
Veracode is another static analysis tool that offers fast scans and real-time feedback on your source code. It measures the software security posture of all your applications.
Another great offering among static analysis tools that helps you check our code quality. It blocks merges of pull requests based on your quality rules and helps prevent critical issues from affecting your product.
A well-known static analysis tool that focuses on managing and monitoring the quality of software projects. It enables you to automatically prioritize problematic snippets in the code and provide clear visualizations.
PVS Studio is best known for detecting bugs and security weaknesses. It offers a digital reference guide for all analytic rules and analysis codes for errors, dead snippets, typos, and redundancy.
Dynamic code analysis tools enable you to analyze and test your applications during execution against possible vulnerabilities.
Choosing what tools fit your requirements could be a bit tricky. As these tools are language-specific and case-specific. You can pick the right tool from an open-source repository by Github based on your current situation.However, we have picked 5 popular dynamic code analysis tools that you can take a look at:
A real-time code coverage tool that provides insights for penetration testing activities.
A vulnerability scanner that checks whether the code follows best practices in security, performance, and reliability.
An interactive tool that analyses un-instrumented ELF core files for leaks, memory growth, and corruption.
A framework for dynamic analysis of WebAssembly binaries.
An instrumental framework that automatically detects many memory management and threading bugs.
Although static and dynamic code analysis tools are effective, they won’t catch everything. Since they aren’t aware of the business practices and functionality you are trying to implement.
This is when you need another developer from your organization. And this is possible with the peer code review tools. They not only help in making better code but better teams as well.
A few of the questions that another developer considers are:
Below are 5 best peer code review tools that you can use:
A peer code and document review tool that enables a team to collaborate and produce high-quality code and documents. It includes a customizable workflow that makes it easy to fit seamlessly into pre-existing work processes.
A standalone code review tool that allows developers to review, discuss and track pull requests in one place. Review Board is an open-source tool that lets you conduct document reviews and can be hosted on the server.
A behavioral code analysis AI tool that uses machine learning algorithms to help find code issues in the early stages and fix them before they cause obstacles. It also helps developers in managing technical debt, sound architectural decisions and improve efficiency.
A lightweight code review software by Atlassian that enables the review of codes, sharing of knowledge, discussing changes, and detecting bugs across different version control systems. It allows developers to create pre-commit reviews from IntelliJ IDEA by using the Atlassian IDE Connector.
An open-source web-based code review tool by Google for projects with large repositories. It has Git-enabled SSH and HTTP servers that are compatible with all Git clients.
Without sounding boastful, our motivation for creating Typo was to enhance our code review process. With Typo, you have the ability to monitor crucial code review metrics, such as review duration and comprehensiveness. Additionally, it allows you to configure notifications that alert you when a code change is merged without a review or if a review has been unintentionally overlooked. There are three major metrics it tracks -
Enhancing development processes goes beyond just increasing speed and quality; it brings predictability to your throughput. By leveraging Typo, you can achieve better performance and planning, ensuring consistent alignment throughout your organization.
Working collaboratively on a project means multiple people have different ideas and opinions. While working on an open source code with multiple people, imagine what happens if everyone starts updating the code haphazardly whenever they want to; that would be chaotic for the result.
This is where pull requests can help your team.
A pull request, also called a merge request, is a fundamental feature in version control systems like Git that enables developers to suggest changes to a codebase, repository, or software development project. The pull request button serves as a distinct platform for discussing and reviewing code changes and discussing the new feature. It enables keeping updates separate from the main project, promoting internal collaboration and potentially external involvement, and streamlining the debugging process.
A merge pull request helps developers work collaboratively. Here are five reasons it is necessary.
Pull requests allow developers to suggest changes and share them with the rest of the team. At the same time, it also helps them grow by getting feedback and suggestions about the fork or branch. They make space for efficient code reviews and then add the changes to the codebase in a controlled manner.
Pull requests are a great way to encourage valuable communication and feedback between reviewers and contributors. With this platform, reviewers can leave comments directly on specific lines of code, allowing space to address concerns, ask questions, and make suggestions for improvements. This collaborative approach promotes peer review, and knowledge sharing and helps team members to develop a shared understanding, resulting in superior solutions. It also helps handle conflict resolution well within a team.
Pull requests play a crucial role in helping the engineering manager track the entire software build process. They serve as a central hub where developers propose changes, enabling the manager to review, provide feedback, and monitor progress. Through pull requests, the manager gains visibility into code modifications, discussions, and collaboration among team members. This allows for effective code review, quality control, and ensuring alignment with project objectives. Furthermore, pull requests often integrate with project management and continuous integration systems, providing a comprehensive view of the software build process and facilitating streamlined coordination and oversight by the engineering manager.
Pull requests play a vital role in ensuring code quality by acting as a gatekeeper. It facilitates a structured and collaborative process for code review, automated testing, and adhering to coding standards. Hence, ensuring that the proposed changes are aligned with the project standards, maintain code quality, and adhere to best practices.
Draft pull request offers a critical mechanism for incremental development. Developers can work on code changes incrementally before finalizing them for integration into the main codebase. It allows for continuous feedback and developers can request review from their peers before the code is said to be complete. Hence, enhancing the software development process' flexibility and the code aligns with the project goals and standards.
Managing pull requests is one of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of the software development process. A few of them include:
Managing branching for each pull request may become complicated when larger projects with multiple features or bug fixes are developed concurrently. It may also happen that change in one branch leads to change in another. Therefore, the interdependency can lead to a complex branching structure.
The engineering team must ensure that the branches are properly named, isolated, and updated with the latest changes from the main codebase.
Managing a large number of pull requests is time-consuming. Especially, when the pull requests are many and very few developers to review them. This further increases the frequency of merges into the main branch which can disrupt the development workflow.
The engineering team must set a daily limit on how many PRs they can open in a day. Besides this, automated testing, continuous integration, and code formatting tools can also help streamline the process and make it easier for developers.
During peer review, merge conflicts are a common challenge among developers. It may happen that the two developers have made changes to the same line of code. This further results in conflict as the version controller isn't sure which one to keep and which one to discard.
One of the best ways to improve team communication and using project management tools to keep track of the changes. Define areas of the codebase clearly and assign code ownership to specific team members.
When making a pull request, ensure you make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to approve or provide feedback. To do this well, here are the components of a good pull request:
Here are the steps to create a pull request:
Step 1: The developer creates a branch or a fork of the main project repository
Step 2: The developer then makes the changes to this cloned code to create new features or fix an issue or make a codebase more efficient
Step 3: This branch is pushed to the remote repository, and then a pull request is made
Step 4: The reviewer is notified of the new changes and then provides feedback or approves the change
Step 5: Once the change is approved, it is merged into the project repository
Once a pull request is made, fellow developers can review the alterations and offer their thoughts. Their feedback can be given through comments on the pull request, proposing modifications, or giving the green light to the changes as they are. The purpose of the review stage is to guarantee that the changes are of top-notch quality, adhere to the project's criteria, and align with the project's objectives.
If there are any changes required to be made, the developer is alerted for updating process. If not, a merging process takes place where the changes are added to the codebase.
Some best practices for using pull requests include:
The code review process significantly contributes to extended cycle times, particularly in terms of pull request pickup time, pull request review time, and pull request size. Understanding the importance of measurement for improvement, we have developed a platform that aggregates your issues, Git, and release data into one centralized location. However, we firmly believe that metrics alone are not sufficient for enhancing development teams.
While it is valuable to know your cycle time and break it down into coding time, PR pickup time, PR review time, and deploy time, it is equally important to assess whether your average times are considered favorable or unfavorable.
At Typo, we strive to provide not only the data and metrics but also the context and insights needed to gauge the effectiveness of your team’s performance. By combining quantitative metrics with qualitative analysis, our platform empowers you to make informed decisions and drive meaningful improvements in your development processes.
We understand that achieving optimal performance requires a holistic approach, and we are committed to supporting your team’s success.
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DevOps has been quickly making its way into every prime industry. Especially in a software development field where it is necessary to integrate DevOps in today’s times.
To help you with the latest trends and enhance your knowledge on this extensive subject, we have hand-picked the top 10 DevOps influencers you must follow. Have a look below:
James is best known for his contribution to the open-source software industry. He also posts prolifically about DevOps-related topics including software issues, network monitoring tools, and change management.
James has also been the author of 10 books. A few of them are The Docker Book, The Art of Monitoring, and Monitoring with Prometheus. He regularly speaks at well-known conferences such as FOSDEM, OSCON, and Linux.conf.au.
Nicole is an influential voice when it comes to the DevOps community. She is a Co-founder of DevOps Research and Assessment LLC (now part of Google). As a research and strategy expert, Nicole also discusses how DevOps and tech can drive value to the leaders.
Besides this, she is a co-author of the book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. Nicole is also among the Top 10 thought leaders in DevOps and the Top 20 most influential women in DevOps.
Founder of Devopsdays, Patrick has been a researcher and consultant with several companies in the past. He focuses on the development aspect of DevOps and analyzes past and current trends in this industry. He also communicates insights on potential future trends and practices.
But this is not all! Patrick also covers topics related to open-source technologies and tools, especially around serverless computing.
A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences. Bridget leads Devopsdays - A worldwide conference service. She also has a podcast ‘Arrested DevOps’ where she talks about developing good practices and maximizing the potential of the DevOps framework.
Bridget also discusses Kubernetes, cloud computing, and other operations-related topics.
Best known for the newsletter 'DevOps Weekly’, Gareth covers the latest trends in the DevOps space. A few of them include coding, platform as a service (PaaS), monitoring tools for servers and networks, and DevOps culture.
Gareth also shares his valuable experience, suggestions, and thoughts with the freshers and experienced developers, and leaders.
Elisabeth Hendrickson is the founder and CTO of Curious duck digital laboratory. She has been deeply involved in software development and the DevOps community for more than a decade. She has authored books on software testing and teamwork within the industry. It includes Explore it and Change your Organization.
Elisabeth has also been a frequent speaker at testing, agile, and DevOps conferences.
Martin is the author of seven books based on software development. It ranges from design principles, people, and processes to technology trends and tools. A few of them are: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
He is also a columnist for various software publications. He also has a website where he talks about emerging trends in the software industry.
Known as the prolific voice in the DevOps community, John has been involved in this field for more than 35 years. He covers topics related to software technology and its impact on DevOps adoption among organizations.
John has co-authored books like The DevOps Handbook and Beyond the Phoenix Project. Besides this, he has presented various original presentations at major conferences.
Gene is a globally recognized DevOps enthusiast and a best-seller author within the IT industry. He focuses on challenges faced by DevOps organizations and writes case studies describing real-world experiences.
His well-known books include The Unicorn Project, The DevOps Handbook, and The Visible Ops Handbook. Gene is also a co-founder of Tripwire - A software company. He has been a keynote speaker at various conferences too.
Jez is an award-winning author and software researcher. A few of his books are The DevOps Handbook, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, and Lean Enterprise.
Jez focuses on software development practices, lean enterprise, and development transformation. He is also a popular speaker at the biggest agile and DevOps conferences globally.
It is important to stay updated with DevOps influencers and other valuable resources to get information on the latest trends and best practices.
Make sure you follow them (or whom you find right) to learn more about this extensive field. You’ll surely get first-hand knowledge and valuable insights about the industry.
Technical debt is a common concept in software development. Also known as Tech debt or Code debt, It can make or break software updates. If this problem is not solved for a long time, its negative consequences will be easily noticeable.
In this article, let’s dive deeper into technical debt, its causes, and ways to address them.
‘Technical Debt’ was coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992. It arises when software engineering teams take shortcuts to develop projects. This is often for short term gains. In turn, this leads to creating more work for themselves. Since they choose the quickest solution rather than the most effective solution.
It could be because of insufficient information about users’ needs, pressure to prioritize release over quality or not paying enough attention to code quality.
However, this isn’t always an issue. But, it can become one when a software product isn’t optimized properly or has excessively dysfunctional code.
When Technical debt increases, it can cause a chain reaction that can also spill into other departments. It can also result in existing problems getting worse over time.
Below are a few technical debt examples:
Prioritizing business needs and the company’s evolving conditions can put pressure on development teams to cut corners. It can result in preponing deadlines or reducing costs to achieve desired goals; often at the expense of long-term technical debt cost. Insufficient technological leadership and last-minute changes can also lead to misalignment in strategies and funding.
As new technologies are evolving rapidly, It makes it difficult for teams to switch or upgrade them quickly. Especially when already dealing with the burden of bad code.
Unclear project requirement is another cause of technical debt. As it leads to going back to the code and reworking it. Lack of code documentation or testing procedures is another reason for technical debt.
When team members lack the necessary skills or knowledge to implement best practices, unintentional technical debt can occur. It can result in more errors and insufficient solutions.
It can also be due to when the workload is distributed incorrectly or overburdened which doesn’t allow teams to implement complex and effective solutions.
Frequent turnovers or a high attrition rate is another factor. As there might be no proper documentation or knowledge transfer when one leaves.
As mentioned above, time and resources are major causes of technical debt. When teams don’t have either of them, they take short cuts by choosing the quickest solution. It can be due to budgetary constraints, insufficient processes and culture, deadlines, and so on.
Managing technical debt is a crucial step. If not taken care of, it can hinder an organization's ability to innovate, adapt, and deliver value to its customers.
Just like how financial debt can narrow down an organization's ability to invest in new projects, technical debt restricts them from pursuing new projects or bringing new features. Hence, resulting in missed revenue streams.
When the development team fixes immediate issues caused by technical debt; it avoids the root cause which can accumulate over time and result in design debt - a suboptimal system design.
When tech debt prevails in the long run, it can result in the new features being delayed or a miss in delivery deadlines. As a result, customers can become frustrated and seek alternatives.
The vicious cycle of technical debt begins with short cuts and compromises accumulate over time. Below are a few ways to reduce technical debt:
The automated testing process minimizes the risk of errors in the future and identifies defects in code quickly. Further, it increases the efficiency of engineers. Hence, giving them more time to solve problems that need human interference. It also helps uncover issues that are not easily detected through manual testing.
Automated testing also serves as a backbone for other practices that improve code quality such as code refactoring.
Code review in routine allows the team to handle technical debt in the long run. As it helps in constant error checking and catching potential issues which enhance code quality.
Code reviews also give valuable input on code structure, scalability, and modularity. It allows engineers to look at the bugs or design flaws in the development issues. There needs to be a document stating preferred coding practices and other important points.
Refactoring involves making changes to the codebase without altering its external behavior. It is an ongoing process that is performed regularly throughout the software development life cycle.
Refactoring sped things up and improves clarity, readability, maintainability, and performance.
But, as per engineering teams, it could be risky and time-consuming. Hence, it is advisable to get everyone on the same page. Acknowledge technical debt and understand why refactoring can be the right way.
Engineering metrics are a necessity. It helps in tracking the technical debt and understanding what can be done instead. A few of the suggestions are:
Identify the key metrics that are suitable for measuring technical debt in the software development process. Ensure that the teams have SMART goals that are based on organizational objectives. Accordingly, focus on the identified issues and create an actionable plan.
Agile Development Methodology, such as Scrum or Kanban, promotes continuous improvement and iterative development, aligning seamlessly with the principles of the Agile manifesto.
It breaks down the development process into smaller parts or sprints. As Agile methodology emphasizes regular retrospectives, it helps in reflecting on work, identifying areas for improvement, and discussing ways to address technical debt.
By combining agile practices with a proactive approach, teams can effectively manage and reduce it.
Last but not the least! Always listen to your engineers. They are the ones who are well aware of ongoing development. They are working closely with a database and developing the applications. Listen to what they have to say and take their suggestions and opinions. It helps in gaining a better understanding of the product and getting valuable insights.
Besides this, when they know they are valued at the workplace, they tend to take ownership to address technical debt.
To remediate technical debt, focus on resources, teams, and business goals. Each of them is an important factor and needs to be taken into consideration.
With Typo, enable your development team to code better, deploy faster, and align with the business goals. With the valuable insights, gain real-time visibility into SDLC metrics and identify bottlenecks. Not to forget, keep a tap on your teams’ burnout level and blind spots they need to work on.
To remediate technical debt, focus on resources, teams, and business goals. Since each of them is important factors and needs to be taken into consideration.
Software engineering is an evolving industry. You need to be updated on the latest trends, best practices, and insights to stay ahead of the curve.
But, engineering managers and CTOs already have a lot on their plate. Hence, finding it difficult to keep up with the new updates and best practices.
This is when engineering newsletters come to the rescue!
They provide you with industry insights, case studies, best practices, tech news, and much more.
Check out the top 10 newsletters below worth subscribing to:
It is defined as the ‘Best curated and most consistently excellent list’ by tech leads. Software Lead Weekly is curated for tech leads and managers to make them more productive and learn new skills. It contains interviews with experts, CTO tips, industry insights, in-depth software development process, and tech market overview to name a few.
This is a weekly newsletter geared towards the tech leads, engineering managers, and CTOs. The author, Patrick Kua shares his reflection and experiences of software engineering, current tech trends, and industry changes. The newsletter also dives deep into trends around tech, leadership, architecture, and management.
The refactoring delivers an essay-style newsletter for managers, founders, and engineers. It sheds light on becoming better leaders and building engineering teams. The author, Luca Rossi also talks about the experiences and learnings in the engineering industry. With the illustrations and explanatory screenshots, the newsletter can also be read by newbie engineers.
This monthly newsletter covers the challenges of building and leading software teams in the 21st century. It includes interesting engineering articles, use cases, and insights from engineering experts. It also provides a solution to the common software engineering problems the CTOs and managers face.
It is known as the Number 1 technology newsletter on substack.’ This newsletter is a valuable resource for team leaders and senior engineers. Each edition contains CTO tips and best practices, trending topics, and engineering-related stories. It also deep dives into engineering culture, the hiring and onboarding process, and related careers.
Tech Manager Weekly is informative and helpful for tech managers. Their editions are short and informative and provide insights into various engineering topics. Software development process, tech news, tech trends, industry insights, and CTOs tips to name a few. The newsletter - Tech Manager Weekly also provides information on how various companies use technologies.
This newsletter is written in an easy-to-understand and crisp format. In each edition, it delivers the latest technology and software news around the world. The newsletter also covers important science and coding stories as well as futuristic technologies.
This newsletter focuses majorly on developers’ productivity. It covers topics such as giving actionable guidance to leaders and how they can create people-first culture. The newsletter also includes what’s happening around the other tech companies in terms of work culture and productivity.
These bite-sized newsletters keep you abreast of the situation in AI, machine learning, and data science. It also includes the most important research paper, tech release, and VC funding. You can also find interviews with researchers, and engineers, in the machine learning field.
Bytebytego is considered to be one of the best tech newsletters worth reading for engineering managers and CTOs. It converts complex systems into simple terms and deep dives into one design per edition. The newsletter also covers trending topics related to large-scale system design.
CTOs and engineering leaders should subscribe to newsletters for the various compelling reasons:
These newsletters are beneficial as they deliver the latest IT news, industry trends, technological advancements, and CTO best practices right to your inbox.
These newsletters may also include information regarding events, workshops, conferences, and other network opportunities for CTOs and tech leaders.
Through these newsletters, CTOs and engineering leaders can get exposure to thought and tech leadership content from experts in technology and management.
Keeping up with a wide variety of engineering topics could be a bit tricky. Newsletters make it easier to stay on top of what's going on in the tech world.
The newsletters we mentioned above are definitely worth reading. Pick the ones that meet your current requirements - and subscribe!
There are various sources of information from which engineers can gain knowledge. But, one of the valuable resources on which even the senior engineers rely is the blogs. These engineering blogs are written by experts who share various aspects of engineering.
These blogs cover a wide range of engineering topics. Such as big data, machine learning, engineering business and ethics, and so on.
Here are 10 blogs that every engineer must read to help them broaden their knowledge base:
Netflix is a well-known streaming service that offers a wide range of movies, series, documentaries, anime, Kdrama, and much more. They also have a tech blog where their engineers share their learnings. They also discuss topics such as machine learning, strong engineering culture, and databases. In short, they cover everything from the beginning until today’s Netflix era.
Pinterest is an image-focused platform where users can share and discover new interests. Their tech blog includes content on various engineering topics. Such as data science, machine learning, and technologies to keep their platform running. It also discusses coding and engineering insights and ideas.
Slack is a collaboration and communication hub for businesses and communities. They have an engineering blog where its experts discuss technical issues and challenges. They also publish use cases and current topics from the software development world.
Quora is a platform where users can ask and answer questions. Their tech blog majorly discusses the issues they face on both the front and backend side. Quora also talk about how they build their platform. It also covers a wide range of engineering topics. Some of them are natural languages model, machine learning, and NLP.
Heroku is a cloud platform where developers deploy, manage and scale modern applications. It runs a tech blog where they discuss deployment issues and various software topics. They also provide code snippets, and tutorials to improve the developer’s skills.
Spotify is the largest audio streaming platform which includes songs and podcasts. In their engineering blogs, they talk about the math behind their platform’s advanced algorithm. Spotify also provides insights on various engineering topics. This includes infrastructure, databases, open source, software development life cycles, and much more.
GitHub is a well-known hosting site for collaboration and version control. They cover workflow topics and related issues in their blog. It also helps developers understand the platform better by discussing their new features, innovations, and DevOps.
Meta is a parent company of Facebook. It also owns other popular social media platforms – Instagram and Whatsapp. Its engineering blog covers a wide variety of topics such as Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and infrastructure. Meta also discusses how it solves large-scale technical challenges and current engineering topics.
Linkedin is the largest social platform where professionals can network, share and learn. In their engineering blog, they share their learnings and challenges while building their platform. Linkedin also provides insights into various software and applications they have used.
Reddit is a popular news and discussion platform where users create and share content. They have a subreddit where they cover a variety of topics such as tech and engineering issues. Besides this, Reddit’s engineers open up about the challenges and perspectives they face in their fields.
Typo is a well-known engineering management blog. They provide valuable insights on various engineering-related topics. It includes DORA metrics, developer productivity, and code review to name a few. Typo also covers leading tools, newsletters, and blogs to help developers keep up with the trends and skills.
We have curated a few of the best blogs engineers can follow. Hope these blogs help engineers to gain a deeper understanding and insights.
Happy learning! :)
SDLC is an iterative process from planning to deployment and everything in between. When applied, it can help in producing high-quality, sustainable low-cost software in the shortest time possible.
But, the process isn’t as simple as it sounds. There are always bug fixes and new features to improvise your product. Hence, you need the right tools to make it simple and quick.
Typo is an intelligent engineering management platform. It is used for gaining visibility, removing blockers, and maximizing developer effectiveness. Through SDLC metrics, you can ensure alignment with business goals and prevent developer burnout. This tool can be integrated with the tech stack to deliver real-time insights. Git, Slack, Calenders, and CI/CD to name a few.
Typo Key Features:
GitHub is a popular git repository hosting service for code sharing. It is a cloud-based tool that allows you to configure, control and maintain code bases with your team. It also offers features such as bug tracking, feature request, and task management. Github’s supported platforms include Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and IOS.
GitHub Key Features:
Bitbucket is the largest version repository hosting service owned by Atlassian. It provides unlimited private code repositories for Git. Besides this, it also offers issue tracking, continuous delivery, and wikis. The supported platforms for Bitbucket include Linux, AWS, Microsoft, and Azure.
Bitbucket key Features:
Jira is an issue-tracking product that tracks defects and manages bugs and agile projects. It has three main concepts: Project, issue, and workflow. Available on Windows, Linux, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, Jira can be integrated with various engineering tools. A few of them include Zephyr, GitHub, and Zendesk.
Jira Key Features:
Linear is an issue-tracking tool for high-performing teams. It is used for streamlining software projects, tasks, and bug tracking. The majority of repeated work is automated already which makes the SDLC activities faster. It has more than 2200 integrations available such as Slack, Gitlab, and Marker.io. The supported platforms for linear are MacOS intel, MacOS silicon, and Windows.
Linear Key Features:
ClickUp is a leading issue-tracking and productivity tool. It is highly customizable that lets you streamline issue-tracking and bug-reporting processes. It has powerful integrations with applications such as Gitlab, Figma, and Google Drive. ClickUp is available on Windows and Android.
Slack is a popular communication tool for engineering leaders and developers. It provides real-time visibility into project discussions and growth. This tool is available for many platforms such as Web, Windows, MacOS, Android, IOS, and Linux. Slack has an extensive app directory that lets you integrate engineering software and custom apps.
Slack Key Features:
Microsoft Teams streamlines communication and collaboration in a single platform. It assists in keeping up to date with development, testing, and deployment activities. Available for Web, IOS, Android, Windows, and MacOS, MS teams include built-in apps and integrations.
Microsoft Teams Key Features:
Discord facilitates real-time discussions and communication. It is available on various platforms which include Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, and IOS. It has an advanced video and voice call feature to collaborate for SDLC activities.
Discord Key Features:
Jenkins is one of the popular CI/CD tools for developers. It is a Java-based tool that produces results in minutes and provides real-time testing and reporting. Jenkins is available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux platforms. It also offers an extensive plug-ins library to integrate with other development tools. Github, Gitlab, and Pipeline to name a few.
Jenkins Key Features:
Azure DevOps by Microsoft is a comprehensive CI/CD platform. It ensures that the entire software development delivery is done in a single place. From automating, building, and testing code, Azure DevOps brings together developers, product managers, and other team members. This tool has cloud-hosted pipelines available for MacOS, Windows, and Linux. Besides this, it has an integration of over 1000 apps built by the Azure community.
Azure DevOps Key Features:
AWS Codepipeline is an ideal CI/CD tool for AWS users. It helps in automating your build, release, and pipeline CI/CD processes. AWS Codepipeline also offers fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates. With easy steps, you can set up Codepipeline in your AWS account in a few minutes. This tool can also be integrated with third-party servers. It includes GitHub or your custom plugin.
AWS Codepipeline Key Features:
SonarQube is a popular static code analysis tool. It is used for continuous code inspection of code security and quality. The quality gate in this tool blocks any code that doesn’t reach a certain quality. It stops the code from going into production. It integrates with various code repositories such as GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab. SonarQube’s supported platforms are MacOS, Windows, and Linux.
SonarQube Key Features:
Codefactor.io is a code analysis and review tool that helps you to get an overview of the code base. It also allows you to get a glance at a whole project, recent commits, and problematic files. The powerful integrations of CodeFactor.io are GitHub and Bitbucket.
CodeFactor.io Key Features:
Selenium is a powerful tool for web-testing automation. It is implemented by organizations of different industries to support an array of initiatives including DevOps, Agile model, and Continuous delivery. Selenium is one of the best test automation tools that can be automated across various Os. It includes Windows, Mac, and Linux as well as browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, IE, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Safari.
Selenium Key Features:
LambdaTest is one of the well-known test automation tools that provides cross-platform compatibility. It can be used with simulated devices on the cloud or locally deployed emulators. This tool can be integrated with a variety of frameworks and software tools. It includes Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Puppeteer, Taiko, Appium, Espresso and XCUITest.
LambdaTest Key Features:
Cypress is an open source automation tool for front-end developers that operates with a programming language – JavaScript framework. It is one of the popular test automation tools that focuses on end-to-end testing. It is built upon a new architecture, hence, it can directly operate within a browser in the same run-loop as your application.
Cypress Key Features:
It is one of the automated code review tools for static analysis. Supporting more than 40+ programming languages, Codacy also integrates with various popular tools and CI/CD workflows.
Codacy Key Features:
One of the code review tools that is built on a SaaS model. It helps in analyzing code from a security standpoint.
Veracode Key Features:
GitHub Co-pilot is an AI pair programmer that uses open AI codex for writing code quickly. The programmer is trained in natural language and publicly available source code that makes it suitable for programming and human languages. The aim is to speed up the development process and increase developers’ productivity. It draws context from the code and suggests whole lines or complete functions. GitHub works the most efficiently with few programming languages. These include Typescript, Javascript, Ruby, Python, GO, C#, and C++. It can be integrated with popular editors. It includes Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code. However, you need to install visual studio code for using GitHub on this platform.
GitHub Co-pilot Key Features:
These tools can assist you well while you work on SDLC activities.
In this article, we have highlighted some of the well-known tools for your team. You can research more about them to know what fits best for your team.
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