In order to maintain effectiveness, software engineering teams must constantly strive to enhance their development, testing, and deployment processes. This ongoing improvement enables teams to foster better collaboration, streamline workflows, accelerate time to market and produce better results. To improve it is important to focus on an organization’s software development approach rather than solely focusing on the end results.  By doing so, organizations can gain valuable insights into their ability to deliver scalable solutions that meet evolving business requirements.

This article will underscore the significance of continuous improvement practices for software engineering teams and provide guidance on implementing these practices.

What is continuous improvement?

Continuous improvement is the ongoing process of identifying and implementing actions to enhance efficiency, productivity, and quality within a team or organization. For a software engineering organization, continuous improvement pertains to refining the development process with the objective of enabling an organization to deliver high-quality software swiftly and efficiently.   

Any part of the software development life cycle (SDLC) is fair game to review and ripe for improvement.  For example, if an organization is experiencing a delay in deploying new features, it is important to have visibility at every stage in the process.  Inefficiencies could exist in the creation of stories, the assignment of issues, the development and review of code, the quality assurance process and the merge to production.  Every stage and step should be metered and monitored.  This allows process leaders to understand deviations from the norm, identify bottlenecks and identify areas for improvement.

Let’s go back to that organization struggling to release new features.  Without observability – finding areas of inefficiency could be a long arduous path filled with hit or miss guesses.  However, if that same organization had metrics at every stage of the process – they might find that stories are the right size, the time to code is the same as ever, but there are issues in the code and approval review process.  In this example, understanding that Cycle Time or Lead Time for Changes is made up of multiple components will help pinpoint areas for improvement.

Starting from when the stories are created, leading organizations should track specific metrics that measure the software development process.  Many organizations probably are already tracking application performance in production or even performing static code analysis – but these types of analysis do little to help with continuous improvement efforts.

How to Begin a Continuous Improvement Process?

Critical to software engineering continuous improvement is the ability to understand a team’s workflows and processes.  Of similar import is identifying key metrics to monitor the SDLC and understanding the relationships between those metrics.  These metrics will allow for delivery baselining and review over time.  This type of metrics will give leaders objective performance data that allows them to easily identify inefficiencies in their team’s process.

However, the type of metrics required will vary based on the questions that require answering.  Examples of these key value questions include:

• Are we delivering software that drives positive business outcomes?
• Are the end-users/customers using and getting value from our product?
• Is the engineering team healthy and growing in skills and improving?
• Are our developers waiting or blocked for inordinate amounts of time?
• How does our release cadence and flow of products compare to other teams?
• Are we creating more bugs and errors than we are removing?

It’s important to note that most of these questions are not directly related to the SDLC process or one individual metric.  They are higher level questions that are connected to business value or the value driven by software engineering.  Identifying the questions that are important will help determine the metrics that are needed to track and analyze.  Without the context of a “why?”, measurement is really just measurement for measurement’s sake.

Tracking SDLC metrics, or any type of metric, can pose challenges as engineering data is dispersed across multiple systems. Furthermore, comprehending the interdependencies between these metrics, their impact on one another, and their alignment with the organization’s core concerns can be daunting, especially for beginners. To initiate the continuous improvement process, it is advisable to analyze the flow of the SDLC and engineering processes. Once the processes have been mapped, identify the crucial value-based questions that can benefit from continuous improvement efforts. Finally, determine the metrics that will allow the modeling of processes, establish baselines, and directly or indirectly address the key value-based questions.

Software Engineering Intelligence

A Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) platform is a tool that offers engineering leaders visibility into their team’s utilization of time and resources, operational efficiency, and progress in delivering quality software. The primary objective is to enable leaders to make data-informed decisions that optimize and enhance the speed, quality, and output of their team’s deliverables, all while prioritizing developer well-being. These platforms prove invaluable in monitoring and measuring various aspects of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and in fostering conditions that promote continuous improvement.

One notable provider in this field is Treno.io.  The platform integrates with SDLC tooling, gathers, combines, and analyzes the metadata from the SDLC. The end result is actionable insights that lead to improved engineering performance and enhanced alignment between software engineering and business objectives. And assistance in implementing tracking improvement goals and initiatives.

For software development teams encountering challenges in meeting demand, facing process bottlenecks, grappling with issues related to quality or security, or seeking to implement continuous improvement, enhance developer effectiveness and productivity, a scalable SEI tool like Treno.io can provide significant assistance.

Benefits of Continuous Improvement

Implementing continuous improvement processes can help teams and their constituents in multiple ways:

Internal benefits of a continuous improvement process

• Establishing achievable goals.
• Reducing engineer stress
• Faster problem-solving

External benefits of a continuous improvement process

• Higher-quality software
• Faster releases
• Business growth

Conclusion

Traditionally, the effort to improve the software development process has been led by gut feelings and team consensus. That usually leads to subjective judgments which don’t create real improvements. By shifting to data-driven decision making and implementing a continuous improvements mindset – engineering teams can become more efficient and successful over time. This will drive better results for developers, the engineering organization as a whole, and customers.