The core of every engineering team’s workflow is how projects go from concept to actual product and how customer feedback can be incorporated into a ticket in the latest sprint. Engineers haven’t had to seek external motivation to improve, but it is the primary goal. More than ever, the ever-growing demands of customers for speed and quality must be a driving force for the progress of your process.
Why are formal processes necessary anyhow
While agile is supposed to allow for flexibility and rapid pivots and shifts, there’s a long history that has been “just enough” in design, process, and testing. The key is that you require a foundational approach, even if rudimentary. At a higher level, all agile development practices look alike and can be compared to Kanban as well as Scrum. Both focus on quick turnarounds and constant refinements that produce outcomes. The majority of systems, even the most straightforward processes, will be a mix of these five essential steps:
New Ticket
Development
Review
Testing
Deployment
Before diving into the deep end, look at your process from a strict distance. How many steps are there in your process? What number was there a year ago or when your team started implementing the workflow?
However, your process has changed in the past, only sometimes in a positive way. Processes can get muddled up with extra steps that cause problems and slow cycle times. For instance, a glitch was discovered during a sprint, so the team added a review process at the conclusion. Eliminating redundant or ineffective procedures is the most efficient method to improve process efficiency.
Now that we’ve analyzed the process from afar, Let’s move down to earth. Each step from the first ticket to deployment is optimized to speed up, increase efficiency, and collaborate to make permanent improvements to the workflow.
Each step helps us detect problematic patterns and behaviors that you can identify within your team. We also suggest solutions that you can implement to tackle and fix them, reducing cycles and increasing your team’s efficiency.
Buy new tickets
Work begins with a brand new ticket, but how do you get it to the right place? How engineers interact with the new keys will impact the cycle time, lead time, and workflow.
The Issue The problem is that it takes too long to give new tickets
It is common to find that your deadline, when a customer submits their ticket to see an outcome, is beyond your desired time.
The Solution: Make use of an automated pull system
Pull systems enable engineers to take on new projects when they are at their best. New tasks are constantly added to the pipeline, and when engineers finish one project, and move on to the following. They don’t have to think about what they’re supposed to be doing, and work continues to be unstoppable.
The Issue The problem is that tickets are slowing down, and the team is overloaded
The new tickets are accumulating and progressing slowly and slowly through the workflow, even though you’re using all of the team’s resources.
The Solution: Begin improving flow efficiency
Improve the efficiency of flow instead of the efficiency of resources. It’s the percentage of time spent active and total working on a particular task. It helps you determine the actual work taking place. Let’s look at the reasons why: If a programmer has four days to develop an application, the workload based on the efficiency of their resources could indicate that they’re overloaded; however if they require just one day of concentrated effort to finish the project which is equivalent to the efficiency of flow at 25%. Resource efficiency puts greater emphasis on completing more tasks simultaneously. Humans aren’t technically capable of multitasking. Therefore, the aim should not be to accomplish more tasks simultaneously. The objective is to maximize the speed of work. The focus on flow efficiency keeps the team occupied, but they can concentrate on completing each task with a natural rhythm.
Development
Most of the work is done during the development phase, but projects are often delayed or blocked from the beginning. To ensure that the flow of work is maintained, it is essential to eliminate obstacles to development.
The Issue The Issue is a slowdown in the development stage
The development phase can take longer than you anticipated due to An uncharacteristic amount of time spent on revising, high churn, or tickets that bounce back and forth within the process.
Solutions: Search for high churn rate, refactoring, and backflow
While fixing the old code is vital, it can lead the developer out of the project’s boundaries. It is easy to spot this by observing the high level of refactoring in legacy. Do not necessarily dissuade this type of work, as it’s essential, but encourage your developer to adhere to the more formal working process. As a team, ask them the entire team to provide updates you need so that you can make tasks later, considering the overall size and scope of the project needs.
When your staff sees greater than usual levels of churn or tickets that keep moving around and around in the development process, there may be problems in the ticket requirements, either shifting in flight or disappearing entirely. Check churn and backflow frequently with your team members to identify the patterns for backflow, refactoring, and churn. This will enable the team to pinpoint the issues and the source of the Issue. Process lies.
The Issue The Issue is an overloaded team member
You can see the backlog of tasks behind the team member, but their work is always excellent. Other developers are transferring specific functions to this individual.
The Solution: Cross-train the team to help spread the burden
Every team is led by an expert in the domain or two who can unintentionally slow work. If their expertise is in a crucial area, you should consider training the others in the team and manually assigning the tasks to multiple hands. It is possible to have the domain expert guide the training. Also, you can set the domain expert various tasks to enhance their abilities.