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5 Ways to Improve Software Delivery Performance

By James Mellor posted 08-16-2020 17:06

  

Improving the ability to deliver software may involve changing how work gets done within an organization. Lean and agile practices offer capabilities that can change company culture and behavior. They can enhance cooperation, continuous learning, surfacing of problems, breaking down of silos and experimentation to bring about improvements.

Measuring productivity is difficult and metrics to look at for software delivery performance include deployment frequency, lead time, time to restore service and what percentage of changes to production fail. 

These metrics measure both tempo and reliability. Optimizing software delivery performance is worth doing to build a high-performing technology organization. 

  1. Autonomy and trust

Team leaders need to make teams comfortable with voicing ideas, concerns and opinions. The leader can provide clear goals but allow the team to decide how the work gets done. This fosters trust and, in turn, has a positive impact on company culture. In an environment of trust, performance is likely to improve. 

  1. Communication and collaboration

Whether teams work in the office or remotely, communication is vital to ensure everyone is on the same page. Without the benefits of advances in technology, this would be impossible. 

Communication is enhanced with messaging technologies that drive collaboration. A phone signal booster could be important in areas where cell phone signals are weak, such as in areas where there is a long distance from a cell phone tower or signal is obstructed by buildings or geography. Signal Booster in Houston is a reseller of top signal booster brands. 

When changing specifications based on feedback, for example, quick communication is vital for the whole team to act in unison instead of wasting time on what is no longer necessary. 

  1. Continuous delivery

Continuous delivery is essential when improving software delivery performance. Today everyone wants to move and learn fast. There are ever more moving pieces and growing complexity. Within this environment, it is important to understand end-to-end delivery and how and where it needs to be improved. 

Analyzing the delivery cycle means finding out how long things take at every step and whether there are any easy tweaks that could bring about improvements. It is often difficult to make improvements when a team is working towards too many goals at the same time. 

Working on one goal at a time may improve the pace of delivery and allow releases to happen more often. It may speed up test and deploy cycles, reduce defects or the time it takes to get fixes into production. 

  1. Continuous learning and improving of skills

Software delivery is a system and while each component may seem to work in isolation, the whole may fail. Integrating all the components can be difficult and there needs to be an understanding of how everything fits together holistically. This is likely to involve some continuous learning and improvement of skills. 

For example, if the goal was one release a week, the team leader would have to invest time in teaching, facilitating and pairing to help the team reach the target. The whole idea is to build skills within the team to enable team members to manage their own work. 

  1. Organizational culture

Technical and management practices shape company culture and that, in turn, improves performance outcomes. Cultural aspects such as breaking down silos, postmortems and continual experimentation to drive improvement are important. In fact, team dynamics make the team more effective than the skills of individual team members. 

Good team dynamics enables team members to deliver organizational and technical benefits. The difference between a star-performing team and a low performing team often comes down to mutual respect, understanding and an environment that fosters learning and growth. 

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