Every day, developers are faced with a large number of tasks that they need to solve efficiently. Among them are the modern web, desktop, and mobile applications development, legacy application modernization, IBM i managed services creation, data security, and many others. To quickly and efficiently solve these tasks, it is important to ensure high developer productivity. However, several factors significantly plunge productivity. In this article, we will list these factors and also give tips on how to increase the developers’ productivity.
What Does Developer’s Productivity Mean?
Developer productivity is a metric that measures how quickly and efficiently a developer can create software that works well and is easy to maintain. To evaluate it, a company may define a list of metrics that it will track, or set specific goals. However, a universal list of metrics cannot be chosen to correctly assess the developers’ productivity.
The process of measuring a developer’s productivity is influenced by a lot of factors such as your workflow, deployment methodology, team structure, development environment, software delivery process, etc. Usually, companies use such criteria as quantity, quality, and importance of the work performed.
How to Measure Developer Productivity?
For the convenience of evaluating developers’ productivity, you can use particular frameworks. One of them is the SPACE framework. It allows you to analyze several factors to get a clear and objective view of productivity. Let’s take a closer look at what this framework offers.
Satisfaction and well-being. Developers’ productivity depends on how satisfied they are with their job, the team, and other factors. Here, important indicators are satisfied with work, the ability to access the necessary tools and resources, and burnout.
Productivity. These are the results of the developer’s work. Here you should pay attention to such indicators as quality, reliability, absence of errors, and the general state of the service.
Activity. This is the number of actions that the developer performs during work. Examples of metrics to monitor are the number of design documents and specifications created, pull requests, commits, code reviews, builds, deployment frequency, incidents resolved, etc.
Communication and collaboration. Developers usually work in a team. Therefore, to increase productivity, they need to communicate and collaborate effectively.
Efficiency and flow are measures of how much progress a developer can make continuously. Metrics that can be used to evaluate this factor include the number of transfers required in a process, the ability to quickly and efficiently complete work, the time required for the entire system, the time between processes, etc.
Why Is a Developer’s Productivity a Critical Factor For a Software Company?
The programmer’s productivity is a very important indicator for the company. It is so because the quality of your projects depends on it, as well as whether they will be implemented on time. The number of satisfied project users depends on its quality and the amount of time and costs for its support and updates. And this, in turn, affects the company’s income.
In addition, when developers have good productivity, they enjoy their work. This allows you to increase the interest of your workers and reduce the likelihood of early burnout and frustration.
Productive development teams generate new big ideas, and allow the company to create, and effectively implement new projects.
Which Factors Influence the Developer Productivity?
There are a lot of factors that affect developers’ productivity. Taking into account these factors allows you to find the real cause of poor performance and eliminate it. All factors can be divided into three main groups:
Psychological factors.
Developer control factors.
Manager control factors.
Psychological factors
The developers’ productivity depends not only on their skills and experience but also on their level of happiness. Therefore, companies need to create favorable conditions for realizing human potential. Developer dissatisfaction can lead to bad consequences for the company, such as poor code quality, delays in completing tasks, low motivation, and refusal to work.
Psychological factors that affect work productivity include:
Monotonous work. With the constant performance of similar repetitive tasks, the employee’s interest decreases. If a developer does not have the opportunity to solve new problems, he does not develop, this negatively affects his productivity.
Hard deadlines. If the developer constantly does not have time to complete the assigned tasks, and reworks, then this leads to stress and burnout. At the same time, worker productivity becomes very low.
The imbalance between work and personal life. With a heavy workload and multitasking, a developer can spend too much time at work and get very tired. At the same time, he does not have time and energy for his personal life. This leads to fatigue and irritation, which adversely affects work performance.
Developer control factors
This group of factors is associated with the personal qualities of the engineer, his attitude to tasks, and his level of self-control.
Experience and skills. The speed of completing tasks directly depends on the availability of relevant and modern skills and relevant experience. Since technology is constantly evolving, developers need to constantly improve their skills and gain new knowledge to increase their productivity.
Clear plan. Companies can use prototype products that were created at an early stage of development. This will give the developer a clear roadmap, less new material to develop, and fewer decisions to make on their own. This will improve productivity.
Manager control factors
The productivity of developers depends not only on them but also on the conditions in which they work. Often there are difficulties in the workplace that interfere with effective work. Let’s look at some of them below.
Unclear requirements. Figuring out clear and understandable requirements can take a developer’s time. In addition, the absence of such requirements can lead to undesirable results of the work and the need to redo it. This reduces the motivation and productivity of the developer.
Team communication. The atmosphere in the team directly affects the performance of its members. To work effectively in a team, there must be a friendly atmosphere in which team members communicate well and help each other.
Multitasking. If employees constantly need to perform a lot of different tasks, then they will constantly be distracted, switching their attention from one task to another. At the same time, the quality and performance will constantly deteriorate.
How to Overcome These Challenges And Boost Developer Productivity?
To ensure high developers’ productivity, first of all, you need to be attentive to their moods. When the first signs of burnout appear, you need to make every effort to prevent it. It is necessary to evenly distribute the load among the engineers, and make sure that the programmers are not too busy. In addition, it is very important to constantly maintain interest in the tasks performed.
Another important factor that will increase productivity is to identify all the important skills that the developer has at a low level and improve them.
Team building has a very good effect on teamwork efficiency. Their regular conduct improves the relationship between employees, which in turn positively affects the results of teamwork. In addition, it is important to give employees enough time for rest and personal life.
Last but not least factor is the use of modern software that automates the application development process. A great option is to use the LANSA tools, which allow you to easily and quickly create modern applications, as well as modernize legacy ones.
Which tools does LANSA provide?
Visual LANSA is a development platform that combines low-code and traditional coding in one IDE. You can use it to rapidly develop and deploy modern web and desktop applications.
LANSA aXes provides tools for upgrading legacy applications. This allows you to leverage existing features and reduce the time and cost of developing modern counterparts. aXes makes it easy to create modern web pages, run a web app on a mobile device, and more.
Use the RAMP tool, which allows you to combine features from old apps with new ones. All this you can do using a minimum amount of code, which allows you to significantly increase productivity.
Sign up for free with LANSA and find out how using the tools it provides can increase developer productivity.
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