3 Software Development Tools for Your Team to Implement Today
One of the ways to make sure your software development team is successful involves giving them access to the tools and other resources they need to work “smarter, not harder.” The more efficient they are as individuals, the more powerful they can be as a collective – meaning that not only are they able to work faster, but the quality of their output tends to improve significantly.
Thankfully, technology has evolved in recent years to the point where there are now a variety of powerful software development tools that can enhance a team’s productivity and efficiency at the same time. Whether you’re concerned with project management, automated testing, or something else entirely, streamlining your development process in this manner brings with it a wide range of different benefits that most teams cannot afford to ignore.
1. The Magic of Ephemeral Environments
By far, one of the top tools that software development teams are still underutilizing in terms of increasing productivity and output quality has to do with ephemeral environments. By their nature, they make it easier for individual team members to collaborate with one another asynchronously. They also offer a number of other distinct advantages that you would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.
As the name implies, ephemeral environments are intended to be temporary in nature. They mimic a production environment completely in terms of functionality but are used more as staging environments. On a day-to-day basis, this means that team members can quickly set up an environment to “preview” any proposed features or changes that are taking place, all without impacting the work that anyone else is doing. Those environments can then be eliminated just as quickly, thus saving a significant amount of time and resources in the process.
In essence, if you want to preview a feature for the purposes of testing or quality assurance or just want to allow other users to see it in action to get feedback, you don’t have to wait for a live production environment to be ready. It can be done instantly without needing anyone else to complete what they are currently doing so that a developer can begin. Any action that takes place within the environment will also not impact the work that others are engaged in.
In addition to helping to save money by reducing overhead, ephemeral environments also make it far easier for team members to collaborate with one another – especially in situations where a workforce may be distributed over a large geographic area or even when people are operating in different time zones. It’s an opportunity to get more work done with fewer resources and on a shorter schedule, thus improving the rate at which a software development team can get a product to market.
2. Taking a True “Bird’s Eye View” Approach with Project Management Tools
Another invaluable type of tool that software development teams can deploy immediately, particularly for the purposes of Agile project management, has to do with a solution like ClickUp. Many such options exist that offer similar functionality, this is just one example.
In addition to offering native integrations with sources like Github, tools like ClickUp also offer Agile dashboards so that software development teams and their project managers can always be on the same page at the same time. This gives organizational leaders a complete, actionable picture to work from with regard to project roadmaps, backlogs (like features that still need to be implemented or tasks that need to be completed), work sprints, and more.
When looking for a solution such as this one, it’s always important to lean into one that is fully customizable because every team works a bit differently from the next. This is true not only for the subtasks that need to be completed but also for who is assigned to complete them. Charts and reports can also be used to see a team’s progress at any given moment.
3. The Art of Project Tracking
Indeed, so much of the success of any software development team comes down to the collective’s ability to understand where you are, how far you’ve come, and how much still needs to be done moment by moment.
For example, Jira is used by teams practicing the Agile methodology. It allows everyone to operate from a single source of truth, regardless of where they are in the world. It’s highly customizable and includes native integrations with many platforms a team is likely already using.
It includes functionality for not only the planning stages of any software development project but also for managing backlogs, testing and quality assurance processes, gaining user feedback, and more. Overall, it’s a tool that can be as flexible as the person using it – it offers the functionality that developers need to focus on their coding while affording team leaders and project managers access to the resources they need to manage everything else that is in motion deftly.
In the end, remember that software development is a malleable process in general – meaning there is no “one right way” or “one perfect tool” to improve productivity and efficiency. Many of the tools on this list will quickly become invaluable to many teams. Others may find them inadequate. Only by starting with the needs of your core team members and by making an effort to understand what you can do to make their lives easier will you be able to give them access to the tools needed to streamline your operations and empower them to deliver high-quality software over and over again.
