Building Healthy Software Development Teams

SDLC: A Complex Black Box

The software development life cycle is a complex black box. There are two main reasons:

Reason-1: Software development is craftsmanship. Humans produce software, not machines.

Reason-2: Software development is a deep cognitive activity. There are complex processes in the background we cannot understand and measure.

How To See The Problems?

The main problem in this complex black box is "not seeing the problems": Where do I have bottlenecks? What to improve? Where is the problem?

Every problem produces its own symptom. We need to hear the symptoms of the software development processes to see the problems. The symptoms lead us to the problems.

The Symptoms Of The Software Development

The question is: "What are the symptoms of a software development cycle?"

Another question that guides you to find the answer is:

"What affects the efficiency of my development teams?"

There is a small list of answers, you can also add yours to the list: Complexity, overload, workload, bottlenecks, technical debt, rework, burnout, unhappiness, blockages... That's all about the systems, individuals, and teams, not only the system-level, team-level, or individual-level.

But I wonder about that how many of them do you track? You may feel the need to improve something unclear. Do you really hear these symptoms with real-time data in your development cycle? Or do we all are just flying blind?

How To Build Healthy Software Development Teams?

The software development life cycle is a complex black box, just like the human body. When you ask a doctor about your symptom (e.g., stomachache), the specialist should find the main problem of your body. Therefore, the specialist doctor requires your story, blood test, and/or medical imaging to diagnose first and then to treat the disease.

"Companies are only as healthy as the teams that compose them." (State of Teams Report 2021, Atlassian)

Engineering Leaders vs. Specialists Doctors

Engineering Team Leads are the specialists of their teams.

They are capable of interpreting and understanding the symptoms of their teams. They can pinpoint the main problems that systems, individuals, and teams have in the software development life cycle.

The Key To Healthy Teams: Engineering Efficiency

Invest in managing software engineering efficiency, not only measuring individuals' performances.

Do not look for ways of measuring developer performance. Try to find a way to improve engineering efficiency.

Consider employing an engineering efficiency platform. Integrate it with your SDLC tools (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, AzureDevOps, Bitbucket, Jira, Jenkins, Sonarqube, NewRelic, etc.) and get complete visibility of your development cycle. Then, Engineering Leaders -as the specialist doctors- will easily start monitoring, identifying, and improving their team's health and performance together with the hidden power of engineering efficiency platforms.