Many companies and development teams are facing a tough challenge: finding and retaining talented developers to drive their work forward. Meanwhile, executives and investors are increasing the pressure on these teams to reduce time-to-market and innovate. Work is fast-paced, while the competition for talent remains high.
To address this challenge, teams are turning to new tools and business practices that increase their team’s productivity and efficiency. Read on to learn more about three proven ways to increase developer productivity:
Maximize Use of Open Source Software
Open source software are the building blocks of all modern applications, and the use of open source is only continuing to grow. While there are many benefits of open source software that companies can point to when rationalizing their adoption, the historical primary reason for selecting open source software – cost savings – is shifting.
According to the 2022 State of Open Source Report from OpenLogic by Perforce, companies are primarily adopting open source software to have faster access to innovation and to modernize their software. That reasoning is prevalent at organizations of all sizes, too, indicating a new reigning reason why teams use even more open source software for enterprise systems.
The growth of open source software adoption, while touching nearly every corner of enterprise IT stacks, is faster in some places than others. As companies continue to adapt their strategies to mitigate ongoing technological skill shortages, there are several areas with faster growth– including the adoption of open source automation tools and open source for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).
Attracting Skilled Open-Source Developers and Operations Engineers
One of the more overlooked benefits of open source software adoption is the increased ability to attract and retain talent. If the only difference between two job opportunities is the option to work on software using open source software, or work on software built using proprietary (and often legacy) software, most skilled software professionals today will select the former.
Improve Developer Productivity
There are countless ways to improve developer productivity. Generally, productivity relies on good workflows, communication, and tools. Leadership must facilitate more effective workflows and communication, optimize the tools their team uses, and measure output in order to adjust and test new methods.
How to Increase Developer Productivity
In many cases when leadership wants to improve developer productivity, they need to assess their workflows and improve communication. See below for tips and additional resources on how to increase team productivity.
Tap Into Visual Communication
Make collaboration and alignment between developers simpler and more intuitive by utilizing visual communication. Use a diagramming tool for complex processes where language alone might not communicate the entire story.
What are some ways you can use diagramming? For one, learn how to make a product roadmap that clearly communicates your vision, aligns stakeholders, and outlines goals for a product. You can also visualize work with UML diagrams and other software engineering diagrams.
Improve Your Development Workflow
Learn how to improve your development workflow by using Agile development methods, enforcing peer code reviews, and adopting CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery) with tools like Jenkins for automation. Optimizing workflows in these ways makes a huge difference in the efficiency of your team and quality of your product.
Those in creative industries face unique challenges when it comes to managing artists and technical teams. Learn about best practices and tools that accelerate development in this game development process guide.
Optimize Your Software Delivery Pipeline
When you have more code, files, and assets to manage than ever before and different teams contributing across your software assembly line, you may run into challenges. Learn how to overcome them by optimizing your software delivery pipeline to maximize your team’s efficiency as well as improve workflows, enable high performance at scale, and improve traceability.
Align QA & Developers
Sometimes, your team may feel like it’s QA vs developer. Your developers wrote incredible code, and QA picked it apart. It’s important to facilitate collaboration and communication between these teams so time isn’t wasted fighting over what needs to be fixed. To help address this issue, check out these best practices for code review.
Enjoy the Benefits of Open Source Java With Enterprise Support
With OpenLogic's supported Java runtimes such as OpenJDK and OpenJ9, your team can get commercial support— saving time otherwise spent on troubleshooting.
How to Measure Developer Productivity
Developer productivity can be measured in a multitude of ways: Number of commits, time spent in review, output per sprint... the list goes on. One of the best ways to measure developer productivity, though, is to get to the source and ask developers themselves.
JRebel by Perforce did just that in their 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report. See the results to learn how productive Java developers think they are, along with findings on where time could be saved in order to boost productivity.
Challenges to Developer Productivity
When measuring developer productivity, you’ll often discover what factors are blocking your team from being 100% productive. Java developer challenges include time spent waiting for code redeploys. Other Java developer challenges could be due to performance issues, working in remote environments, or continuous integration.
To solve these challenges and better measure productivity, we’ve rounded up tips for Java developers, tips on how to share code, a how-to on boosting DevOps collaboration, and a guide on when to use outsourced development.
Agile Development Methodology
To maximize developer productivity, many organizations have adopted the Agile development methodology.
Often compared to waterfall, Agile development meets today’s DevOps demands by working through continuous iterative sprints. Teams today favor the Agile method over waterfall, since Agile provides more flexibility and enables teams to deliver releases faster. By becoming more Agile, teams can deliver the features with the most value to customers while getting immediate feedback.
To make the implementation of Agile as smooth as possible, organizations must address cross-team collaboration and break software requirements down into smaller chunks. Developers must also adopt tools and re-design software architecture to make the software more adaptable to change and easier to ensure quality.
One way to keep software bugs in check during the design process is by adopting static analysis for Agile. With static analysis, developers can ensure code is free of defects and security vulnerabilities to help build high-quality code faster.
Use the Right Tools and Best Practices
Organizations continually look for ways to accelerate DevOps productivity and expedite their time-to-market. However, accelerating DevOps can be a major challenge as security, safety, compliance, and coding defects must be found earlier in the development process before they become too difficult and expensive to fix. Yet with the right tools and best practices, it is easy to accelerate DevOps productivity.
In addition, embedded software often has large codebases, which makes using the right DevOps tools to effectively accelerate software development essential. What’s more, these codebases rely on high-quality code that is compliant, secure, and reliable. One simple method is to improve quality with static analysis.
Put simply, static analysis is a method of debugging that identifies defects, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues as code is being written. In addition, a static analysis tool supports shift-left by enabling developers to fix coding issues earlier — lowering overall costs and enabling teams to deliver a quality product on time.
There are a number of collaborative development tools on the market. One of the most foundational of these tools is version control, which tracks changes to code and files and allows multiple people to work on a project at one time.
Helix Core, version control by Perforce, seamlessly creates a single source of truth across your entire toolchain. It stores every version of every file and lets teams visualize changes to code. Branching with Perforce Streams lets you optimize and automate workflows. And you can see who is working on what, when, to avoid wasted time and effort. Helix Core also supports Git content — check out the developer collaboration tools in Helix TeamHub.
Remote work has necessitated changes to many team’s toolsets. For instance, teams are moving to the cloud, and home internet connections may not be as strong as in the office. Learn more about enabling teamwork and faster development for remote teams in this collaborative game development blog.
Continuous delivery, abbreviated as CD, is a software development practice that automates continuous process and software improvement.
Without this automation, it could take months for developers to manually develop, test, and deploy their code. With speed to market being critical, it is clear why continuous delivery is important.
Not only does this agility make life easier for software development teams, but its financial benefits are recognized through revenue gains and cost reductions, a topic we explore in our white paper on the economics behind continuous delivery.
As for continuous delivery tools, there are many options available, but one of the most used is an open source integration server called Jenkins. Known for its scalability features out-of-the-box, Jenkins does have some challenges, though implementation can be made easier by Jenkins scaling on top of Kubernetes.
Created by Google, Kubernetes is an open source containers orchestration tool, providing the ability to deploy, scale, and operate with multiple containers from one place. A Jenkins Kubernetes pairing creates an ideal environment for scalability, made possible by Jenkins plugins.
Among the variety of automation tools for developers, test automation is incredibly important in the ever-growing and ever-changing digital landscape. It relieves pressure on developers and testers. Software testing is a comprehensive process that requires coordination efforts by business stakeholders, developers, and testers. Manual testing is the most common type of software testing, but it is time intensive and difficult to scale.
Some developers may be apprehensive about making the transition from manual to automated testing. And while it is the preferred method of testing teams today, organizations face barriers when trying to implement automation. That’s where a good testing automation tool comes in.
A good testing automation tool can be hugely beneficial when working with open source automation frameworks. Open source automation frameworks, such as Cypress and Selenium, include best practices, assumptions, tools, and libraries to use across teams. The term “frameworks” is used interchangeably with tools when it comes to open source.
Selecting the right open source automated testing tool and framework is important. But there are countless open source automation testing tools available. So, how do you choose the right open source tools for testing?
No matter what tools and frameworks you use, Perfecto can help you overcome your testing challenges. That's because Perfecto has integrations to whichever ones you use.
Increase Developer Productivity With the Power of Perforce
Perforce Software helps teams create and increase their competitive advantage with solutions spanning the DevOps lifecycle. Explore how the solutions covered in this article can support your team’s workflow and improve collaboration.
