Level-Up Your Dev Team With These Tips

When hiring a dev team, you will be looking for highly skilled, innovative, experienced, and motivated people. But even the best group of devs run into trouble from time to time. As a team lead or a business owner, if you notice your dev team seems to be hitting a lot of walls or bottlenecks, you need to get to the bottom of it.

Most of the time, a discussion with the team will give you the insight you need, but it is a good idea to consider what action you can take to help them achieve. 

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

Limits 

From idea to release, there are a lot of complex processes that go into the journey of a developer. And you might not realize some of the barriers that they are hitting or working around. 

To optimize the developer’s journey, you’ll need to look at what they are up against. It could be old, slow, outdated software, or it might be that the tasks that they do are beyond their limits. 

No matter how innovative your dev team is, if they are using old processes and programs, you’re going to need to consider how you can modernize the process or outsource it to https://txidigital.com/services/modernize. 

Ask the team for feedback on what they think is limiting their work capabilities and make a plan for how to move forward. 

Here are some of the biggest blocks: 

• Incorrect tools
• Outdated hardware and software
• No cooperation or collaboration 

Easier debugging

The bane of every coder and coding team is debugging. It is one of the longest and often most difficult tasks – and coders know, to get rid of one bug, and 75 new ones pop up. Depending on the complexity of the code, this can take hours to days or weeks to get right. 

There might be some members of the team who would rather throw out a product with a few bugs that you know about than fix them. There is a discussion to be had about that – because sometimes it allows for more feedback and improvements. Other times, the bugs are too substantial to ignore. 

When bugs aren’t identified or fixed, it can lead to financial loss later in the process. 

So the question really is – what software do you have in place that will help dramatically reduce the time it takes to find and fix bugs? Regular debugging is time-consuming; debugging software will speed up that process by about 50 times in terms of locating the bug. 

• Airbake
• Chrome DevTools
• ReSharper
• Memfault
• Fiddler
• Raygun

Automate the debugging process, and you will free your dev team up for other tasks. 

Feedback loop

The feedback loop should always include negative and positive feedback, and it needs to be as fast as possible. There are multiple feedback loops that a dev will do on a daily (hourly) basis to make sure that their code isn’t buggy. 

Key feedback loops in a highly effective team will take a maximum of 4 weeks, and here are some of them: 

• Validate local code changes
• Root cause 
• Validation of integration of components
• Internal technical queries
• Validation of customer changes

Devs are more likely to run the feedback loop if the duration is shorter and if they have feedback that they can take action on. So, the feedback needs to be valuable to the developer directly. 

Look at the fastest and slowest feedback groups and aim to optimize the slow ones first. This will be a time-consuming task; however, it will give your team a lot more time. 

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

Collaboration 

Some devs who work in an individual way can be highly effective and highly productive when left alone. However, some projects need multiple disciplines – and that means teamwork. Collaboration can be very beneficial when things like communication are good. 

Collaboration in a dev team means multiple eyes on any code, which can improve the quality through knowledge and skill sharing. Silos will be eliminated when the team has open and easy communication, and the decision-making can be more efficient too. 

If collaboration is lacking in your team, you can do a few things to help them: 

• Transparency throughout the company.
• Idea-sharing culture (judgment-free).
• Top-down leadership – walk the walk, be on the floor and in the mix.
• Rewards and initiatives
• The right tech to support collaboration 
• Multi-department collaboration and skill sharing

Learning and training can help your team become closer-knit, too. Sharing knowledge in an open space with some snacks or formal training can be incredibly useful. 

Innovation

Always remember why you hired someone and a lot of the time, it comes down to their innovation, authenticity, and skills. Innovation is an important part of the digital work that you do. 

One of the biggest barriers to innovation is working in a place that will not openly listen to ideas, likes to keep things ‘as they always have been,’ and offers no positive support for new ideas. Employees who feel like their workplace is unsafe to talk about ideas and innovation will not do their best work. 

Not only is that one of the fastest ways to put your company in the ground, but you will lose the employees who have something to offer. 

Not only should you encourage ideas and conversations, but you should lead by example here and offer up ideas of your own. 

Even an idea like a program that can write 1000-word essays for free (AI content) was once considered impossible, but someone came up with the idea and shared it. And now, we have hundreds of AI options. 

You can copy Google, for example, and spend 20% of your working time just thinking things up or letting your employees work on side projects to see what they might be. 

Digital products and services have changed how the world works, and having a team that is working as one is a powerful machine of production and good products. If your business is pivoting or looking for a new direction for your devs to move in, read this: The Complete Guide To Saas Development And How It Is Disrupting Business.