As the leader of software development teams, you are right to focus on the heart of the project: the source code. After all, this is where the final deliveries are. On the tooling side, a version control system like Git is the usual choice. Yes, Git helps developers work together and collaborate asynchronously. Some development teams stop here. But they can do more to facilitate more effective software team collaboration and produce better quality software.
This is how building software that you and your team can be proud of, delivered on time & on budget and with fewer bugs.
To show you what an effective software development workspace looks like in the real world, I encourage you to experiment with a Tuleap Enterprise trial space. You will see the difference in few minutes: everyone always knows what the next top priority is, for no more waiting around! Plus, if a test fails, you can identify the affected parts of the source code immediately.
Developing software is not rocket science
What are the characteristics of projects that get done?”
They did not know it was impossible, so they did it” with:
- Daring
- Imagination
- Individual skills
- Best-of-breed tooling
- Co-elaboration
Whether it is putting a man on the moon or developing software, the ingredients of a successful project are the same. But, even though we know this, we continue most of the time to engage in behaviors we know to be ineffective.
5 ways NOT TO run software development team work
1. Multiply emails to inform team members on project progress and cut-off times
2. Share only code. A repository is quite enough to connect people
3. Copy and Paste, that’s the same as Automating. It doesn’t take a long time to copy a task status from one tool to another
4. No need of documentation. I’s old-fashion. Just take a Google sheet even for NDA
5. Ask everyone which is his favorite tool. You will get various dispatched tools. A unique workspace, non reproductable !
Sound familiar? 🙂 You can do better.
The secret (really ?) recipe for a modern agile software team collaboration
No miracle news below, simply a reminder of things you probably already know… but most importantly, how to add secret sauce to your recipe every day.
1. Share project vision so that everyone knows the final goal
How to do? To boost team collaboration, put together customers, project leaders, developers, future users into one single and full-featured workspace. All will get the same big-picture view of the project but each can work with special tools dedicated to his job.
2. Make easy and non-disturbing to be up-to-date even if someone miss a meeting
How to do? Visual dashboarding is the solution. A Kanban board for example displays the most important information on a single screen so the project progress can be monitored at a glance. Charts -burnup, burndown, velocity, gantt, pies- faster decision-making as well.
3. Work with integrated tools to reach end-to-end traceability from the first ideas to final releases
Traceability in software development is vital. Being able to trace items all along the software lifecycle is a significant factor in ensuring quality software and understanding the development cycle of a product. The benefits are huge: align evolving market needs with the software developed, understand where a requirement impacts the source code, or why the code changed, satisfy industry compliance, avoid loss of information by capturing history.
But how? Dispatched tools -as an IDE on one hand, a Git repo on another, and a Google doc somewhere else- prevent traceability. To reach it, teams need integrated tooling that facilitate bi-directional and automated linking.
4. Make your development process clearer and automated
The aim is twofold: 1/ to move from “what is ready” releases to clear “feature-driven” releases, 2/ to eliminate time-consuming and room for errors manual tasks.
How to do? Combine the capabilities of version control -as Git-, continuous integration -as Jenkins-, code review -as Git Pull Requests or Gerrit- and tests -as Tuleap Test Management- to create a complete and automated development environment. Thus developers spend their time l only on writing valuable code. Development workflow is made repeatable. Releases become safer, more sustain, with less bugs before deployment.
5. Decide who can do what
Some projects may be public, others, more critical, must remain private.
How to do? Check before using a tool, that you can set fine-grained permissions and monitor access control on dashboards, tasks, repos and documents. . In Tuleap for instance, each project leads can define its own users groups and set permissions on individual project items, very neatly. Project Managers should bring a particular attention of this capability when selecting a tool for their teams.
Do you see the gap between a lonely Git repo and an integrated platform?