Keep overhead costs low without sacrificing quality by adhering to these fundamentals
The software development world is full of stories of upstart underdogs bursting onto the market with a product that outmaneuvers and outclasses the industry giants in their field. They’re proof that success can come from anywhere. They’re also proof that success takes more than a killer idea.
Optimizing developer efficiency requires a specialized approach — one that provides your staff the autonomy to do their best work, the honesty to give and receive constructive feedback, and the knowledge to implement automated tools and processes that fill in the gaps. The following tips will guide you toward building collaborative and efficient teams that can compete with the biggest players in the market.
Build a DevOps Culture Throughout the Organization
DevOps aims to bring developers and operations teams closer to the products they create.
Before DevOps, teams existed within their own silos, which led to fragmented development structures. This fracturing created roadblocks in workflows, leading to frustration and even a culture of blame in more toxic environments.
DevOps culture breaks those silos down, unifying development and operations teams into a single discipline where the people who make the product are also the ones who run it. DevOps cross functional teams that embrace holistic processes see an increase in transparency as knowledge sharing and candid feedback are encouraged. Development becomes more collaborative, while individual team members are more likely to take ownership of their work. Plus, frameworks built on automation allow for more efficient development and deployment of higher-quality code.
These elements combine to create a more satisfying working environment for employees, a better product for consumers, and increased revenue for key stakeholders.
In short, fostering a DevOps-centric engineering organization structure is worthwhile for any organization, even if it doesn’t have any DevOps engineers on the payroll. So, how can your team adopt a DevOps culture? Here are some steps your team can take now to jumpstart the process:
- Get organizational buy-in: A DevOps culture will only take root if developers and executives are on board. Build processes that reinforce this culture, and continue to practice and refine them until they become second nature.
- Encourage honest feedback: Creating software is a team effort; everyone owns the final product. This ownership includes the failures as well as the successes. As a result, delivering honest feedback is not a chance to spread blame but rather to improve processes that will improve the final product. Developers should be able to give and receive constructive criticism without worrying about potential blowback.
- Give developers more control: Each developer knows their own strengths and weaknesses. They also know what needs to be done at any given moment. Taking a hands-off approach with your developers gives them the autonomy to deliver their best work.
- Embrace automation: Automating routine processes unlocks other development opportunities, giving team members time and energy back to work on high-priority tasks. By embracing no-code/low-code automation platforms such as DuploCloud, you can give your team a DevOps foundation without increasing headcount. Read our whitepaper and discover how these platforms prioritize developer efficiency while meeting strict compliance requirements, reducing cloud operating costs, and delivering better products.
Read What Is DevOps Culture? How CTOs Can Build Collaborative Teams for more information.
Rely on Automation, Not Overhiring
Success means investing in areas that will help keep your organization flexible, especially during turbulent economic times. Pouring more of your budget into headcount will make it more difficult to weather risk than investing a similar amount in variable costs, such as automated tools that can help achieve similar outcomes.
As such, it’s best not to overhire right out of the gate. Instead, consider automation-forward alternatives like the following to help you achieve your development goals:
- Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) provide robust infrastructure automation capabilities that DevOps engineers would otherwise manage. These tools integrate with current systems and offer more streamlined development, provisioning, and deployment pipelines without adding headcount. PaaS tools, however, offer a limited scope when it comes to meeting compliance standards, and bring with them high costs that may put them out of reach of many organizations.
- Internal developer platforms (IDPs) are best suited for larger organizations with more unique engineering needs, thanks to their significant up-front time and resource investments. Once completed, however, IDPs can speed up deployment times and enhance efficiency through automated processes and developer self-service capabilities. Smaller organizations can reap the benefits of IDPs by leveraging automated DevOps tools like DuploCloud for an out-of-the-box solution that significantly reduces the labor and resource requirements for implementation.
Weighing the pros and cons of adding additional headcount? Read How to Know If It’s Time to Hire DevOps Engineers to find out what’s best for your organization.
Optimize Developer Efficiency With These KPIs
Measuring developer performance is the best way to determine if your team is operating at peak efficiency. By building tracking into your development processes, you’ll discover critical insight into deployment speeds, failure rates, and operational downtime.
These KPIs will help inform you about potential improvement areas in your tools and processes:
- The change failure rate is the percentage of code deployments that fail when moving to production. A high change failure rate may indicate a conflict within your deployment pipeline that is causing issues.
- Deployment frequency measures how frequently updated code is deployed to production. A high deployment rate means your organization is swiftly building and pushing updates to the public. In contrast, a low rate could mean roadblocks preventing developers from working efficiently.
- Lead time is the time between designing a fix and releasing it to production. Peak lead time rates are usually within a few hours. Longer times can sacrifice customer satisfaction and leave potential security exploits intact.
- Mean time to recovery measures the time it takes to bounce back from system failure. Faster times mean your team can collaborate, solve problems, and deploy fixes quickly and efficiently.
Discover more ways to measure success and improve performance by reading The Essential List of DevOps KPIs.
Boost Developer Accuracy and Efficiency With DuploCloud
The key to maximizing developer efficiency is leveraging your tools to complete standardized and repeatable tasks. That way, your team can focus on the development work that will put your product ahead of the competition.
DuploCloud’s powerful DevOps Automation Platform can help unlock your team’s full potential without increasing headcount. Its no-code/low-code capabilities streamline development processes, allowing faster and more reliable infrastructure orchestration and provisioning. DuploCloud also offers seamless integration with over 500 cloud services and is built to speed compliance with security and privacy standards such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2.
Make DuploCloud the backbone of your organization’s DevOps culture. Sign up for a free demo and find out how DuploCloud can help reduce cloud operating costs by up to 75% and speed up deployment times by a factor of ten.
