Achieving Software Development Productivity Naturally
Posted on Thu, Oct 28, 2010
By Adam Kolawa, Parasoft CEO and Co-Founder
Developing software can be supplemented with automation, but we must accept that software development remains a complex, human-oriented task. In order to achieve greater levels of developer productivity, we must supplement human behavior with an unobtrusive process that fits into a human’s natural workflow while achieving the objectives of the organization.
Change is Required
Achieving a return on investment by optimizing any resource requires change. This might be a change to a process or a change to the input to the process. From a human perspective, supplementary changes to a process or infrastructure offer the greatest opportunity for success. In software development, radical changes to the organization’s current infrastructure can have severely detrimental impacts. The endeavor to increase productivity within the SDLC must leverage current assets and fit seamlessly into the existing environment.
Keeping the Goal in Sight
People are more productive when they know exactly what they need to do. Developers are no different. If all the work they need to accomplish is provided right before their eyes—in their natural development environment—their productivity increases.
Unobtrusive Monitoring
That's why it's important to manage the correct granularity of developers’ tasks directly through the IDE. As developers evolve code, you want to unobtrusively monitor that developers’ work adheres to the project’s policies and goals, which are established by management. Ideally, you set up an unobtrusive, invisible infrastructure that only interacts with (nudges) staff when policies are not being followed. These policies, visible and monitorable, increase efficiency by reducing overhead and removing re-work.
With such a system established, managers can:
- Verify whether a project is on budget because it is constantly monitored.
- Verify that the required quality is achieved based on the policies put in place.
- Determine when additional resources are needed (for instance, because the work has become more complex than expected).
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