In today’s business environment, being agile is essential to dynamically adjust and adapt to business intelligence and enhance productivity. It is not always easy to measure the efficiency and capacity of your software development team. There isn’t a concrete formula to achieve this, but there are things that can be incorporated to measure and improve the health and efficiency of your software development team.
1) Fixed end times for meetings
Sprint stories need to be properly prepared before each meeting and need to have time limits. This time can be easily measured with certain time tracking tools. These tools can also keep track of different meetings and the time taken to conduct them separately.
2) Incorporate a Test-Driven Environment
It is crucial to incorporate a test-driven environment within your development cycle to ensure that everyone contributes better codes with fewer bugs. Agile or Waterfall method can be used by any type of development project. Since a lot of developers may not know how to do it, ensuring that the team is properly trained to achieve this is necessary.
3) Peer Code reviews
Peer code reviews will help in ensuring that the project is being developed with quality code. The technical team senior members can conduct spot-checks to quickly ascertain if code quality has been maintained.
Senior engineers will also have the ability to compare the amount of code written and the time spent writing it (logged on) which is an indicator of whether the software development was optimized or not.
4) Continuous Integration
A great way to identify and solve problems quickly, Continuous Integration can ensure that code builds and the new code doesn’t destroy everything that already exists. When CI is coupled with Test Driven Environment and maybe even Acceptance Test Driven Development, you can also design automated repeatable test suites that are created in order of magnitude.
5) Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction plays a significant role in measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of the software development team. Implementing regular check-ins with the client during the development cycle can help this achieve. If the customer is happy and feels that the team is making adequate progress, this is a good indicator that things are moving forward in a nice manner.
6) Develop Coding Standards
Coding standards once set up, can help to keep the team on track. It is also a good idea to review them periodically (quarterly) and update them accordingly.
Every project/ team member is different and will have their own unique differences with its own complexities. Therefore it is always useful to use the above as a guide and not as processes that are set in stone.