10 Life hacks on how to speed up development without sacrificing quality
Achieving the goal of a faster development process usually involves optimizing the management and HR practices. Even though faster development might negatively influence the quality, in the article, we will discuss ten life hacks that could help increase the development pace while maintaining the desired quality of a project.
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Increasing team size
The initial and the most obvious solution is to increase the amount of the needed resources to make the development process faster without sacrificing the quality. In such a case, hiring more developers and testers would influence faster delivery and divide the responsibilities more equally. Also, it could help avoid developer burnout and crunch times, since more people would perform their share of work and have the time margin for making mistakes and solving the development issues.
Set clear goals
With a clear understanding of the goals, every team member would be able not only to assess their own capabilities but also will be more effective in delivering the results. This principle depends on the managerial approach. Therefore, every project manager that wants to facilitate a smooth, relatively fast, and quality development process should be able to define the goals, approximate results, and how they should be achieved.
Effective communication
This notion correlates with the previous one, but it is mostly related to the ability of the project manager to establish clear communication with the team members and between them. The team members who can communicate the ideas, progress, and requests could be more productive because they better understand the process and are aware of the other peculiarities. To achieve effective communication, it might be even necessary to spend time with the team member in an informal environment or conduct meetings where everybody can share the progress or ask questions.
Dividing the project into small parts
The idea of dividing a big project into smaller parts and defining the deliverables is at the core of project management. Small goals are not only easier to achieve but also provide a sense of achievement after completing each part and eventually, the feeling of gratification from completing the whole project provides a positive understanding. Thus, the developers would feel the fulfillment after completing the small parts and will be more motivated and experienced to pursue challenging themselves to complete other parts on the way to making something whole.
Outsourcing the development
Outsourcing the development to the companies specializing in it is the perfect solution because they provide quality work and deliver the results within the established deadline. In addition, numerous outsourcing companies specialize in providing development solutions for the different scales and high-quality final products. These companies usually include all the development services; all you need is to allocate the resource and describe the technical task for the team of professionals.
Process automation
The implementation of automated solutions into the development is a significant factor in speeding up the process. Mainly, it is because the developers do not have to complete the mundane and boring tasks and concentrate on the actions that require more creative decision-making. For instance, the automated testing software will reduce the workload and increase the developers’ productivity in other aspects of work.
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Do not be a perfectionist
Usually, the testing stage involves catching as many bugs as possible, and as a result, this process might bring exhaustion and lead to burnout. Subsequently, the development and testing of other features would be either slowed down or with the drops in the quality. Sometimes it is ok not to be the perfectionist in cases like that because it would take less time and resources to fix something after rather than run tests repeatedly and meticulously.
Limit work-in-progress
When the developers are overwhelmed with the idea that they have too much work in progress, they might get frustrated, and it could lead to burnout. Limiting the work-in-progress could bring more consistency to the development process because the developers will not feel the scope creep and will not have the feeling that they still have a long way to go. As mentioned above, completing the small tasks and gratification from the small wins keep developers motivated. Limiting the work-in-progress could be an important move to speed up development by preventing burnout.
Reducing work hours
Another life hack that aims to speed up the development by making the performance of the developers more efficient. Several studies indicate the correlation between the reduction of the working hours and increase in the effectiveness and productivity. The developers can also feel the relief with the smaller working hours, the same as in this study. Moreover, the reduction of the working hours also contributes to fewer mistakes. In this regard, reducing the developers’ working hours could help them perform better and have sufficient time to recover and not accumulate fatigue.
Asking for the early feedback
Receiving early feedback on the development process would help to speed up the tasks that have to be improved. Also, the feedback could influence the understanding that the current processes fit the needs and do not require any additional features. Basically, early feedback works as the aligning mechanism to understand whether the development moves in the right direction, and you would not need to redo something at the end. As a result, the development team can work faster and be less stressed about the possibility of frustration after the final product is ready and it requires certain rework.
Conclusions
Lastly, one may admit that choosing the right approach to speed up the development process without sacrificing quality is complicated because you need to consider the factors peculiar to your resources, situation, and goals. Nevertheless, the most effective practices involve the reduction of the workload and effective management.
