Optimize Developer Productivity and Speed Time to Market for Data-Related Apps

Introduction

Data is fundamental to today's digital world. Data and data connectivity are the essences of business decisions. Yes, you’ve heard it right! Analytics, BI, ETL all have one thing in common - they all rely on data. Enterprises need correct data to make the right business decisions. The need for data and data related applications has been growing day by day. Data connectivity helps us to communicate, work, travel, and stay informed.

To be successful, software providers should be adept at two things. First, it is to determine the right approach towards data source and application connectivity. Then, it is to maintain those connections. The proper resources are not enough to have. You also need the correct maintenance and scalability strategies. The right data connectors will help to cut costs on both development and ongoing maintenance for the software vendors.

In this article, we are going to describe how you can optimize the developer’s productivity. It will also deal with enhancing the product quality, streamlining long-term maintenance, and accelerating time to market for data-centric applications.

IT Projects Often Go Over Time and Budget

Software projects fall behind the schedule and excess the budget quite often. It has been observed that large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time. However, they deliver 56% less value than expected or promised.

The project delivery is possible on time, on budget, and with profit. However, you should follow specific guidelines and best practices.

How Do You Accelerate Time to Market?

Time to Market (TTM) stands for the time volume that an organization takes to launch a product or a feature for the end-users. It includes the time spent on the idea generation and the time needed to complete the entire design and development cycle. Speeding up the time to market is an essential challenge for modern businesses.

Coming up with the right strategies demand better control over the development process. Then, you have to act accordingly to those strategies. For instance, the time to market would be affected if you aren't able to detect bugs early and fix them.

At a glance, here are the main reasons for the time to market delays:

• Poor market research
• Inefficient testing
• Failure to adhere to agile principles
• Failure to embrace automation

Let’s discuss the best practices to follow to ensure a faster time to market.

Review the Development Process

First of all, you should review the current development process, identify the bottlenecks, and set a baseline. Then, you need to set realistic goals so that you can track and measure the progress. Reviewing the current development process is crucial since it would enable you to determine flaws in the process. This way, you will detect the activities that are slowing the process down.

Reduce Rework

Rework is a costly affair in software development. It demands time and effort to redo a task or an activity that was worked on earlier. Often, it is more time than you’d need to do the entire job.

Rework may result from bugs in the application, poor communication, and coordination, or even unclear requirements. In any case, redoing a piece of code is something you should avoid. The primary goal is to devise ways to reduce (or better eliminate) rework.

Still, rework to a certain extent is inevitable in any software development process. However, you can identify the best practices to reduce it and adhere to them. These include the following:

1. Embrace Agile development methodology
2. Ensure that your developers understand all the requirements
3. Integrate test design into the development process
4. Follow test-driven development
5. Detect bugs early

Improve Developer Productivity

Several ways let you improve developer productivity efficiently. Let’s consider them:

• Feedback — Provide feedback early and continuously. It ensures that you’ll be able to seamlessly improve the application and incorporate changes (if any). This way, the business value delivery is much easier. Also, reduce the rework as much as possible.
• Team Morale — Always ensure that the team is motivated. You need to foster the culture of rewards, recognition, and innovation. A team that is motivated and well-bonded can perform better and deliver business value. Provide a clear sense of direction so that your team is aligned. Besides, you should encourage a healthy work-life balance.
• Self-improvement — The better skills your developers possess, the faster they can solve complex problems. Encourage continuous learning and facilitate training sessions for the team. It is an excellent way to increase the team's overall skill level.
• Automation — In achieving a faster time to market, automation is one of the most critical steps to take in your organization. Leverage the automation tools that are currently available and introduce automated processes in the development cycle. Automate the build and release management – you can take advantage of CI/CD here. Once the release cycle is automated, your developers can spend more time on things that add value.

Data Connectivity: Understanding the Challenges

The size and diversity of data sources have grown enormously over the past few years. The data connectivity has become more critical than it ever was before. At the same time, it is not easy to test and manage the data connectors. There are essential points to consider before you embrace new data sources

• The number and variety of data models and query languages
• The time needed for adding new data sources
• The cost of the broken data connections fixing.
• The time spent on testing and integration 

Operate the Right Data Connectivity Solutions

The demand for data connectivity has been growing leaps and bounds. It doesn't really matter whether you keep your data in the cloud, on-premise, behind a firewall, etc. You need a fast, secure, and uninterrupted data connectivity. Business users must be able to connect to the BI or Analytics tools, analyze the data, and extract insights.

Let's review the complexity involved in the application of data source connectivity.

Typically, each data source has an API to connect to it. This fact implies that you would need to build a custom solution to get access to the data source. Hence, you have to understand your customer's data source requirements to be able to deliver value.

With several customers using different systems, this problem gets more complicated. Working with each data source in this way involves a lot of time. It is also costly. The thing is, the APIs are different for each data source. Developing and maintaining these many access points is a nightmare.

Does the solution exist? Fortunately, yes. The data connectivity solutions come to the rescue. And the most cost-efficient approach is to buy an off-the-shelf data connector, rather than build your own tool from scratch. You can take advantage of Devart Data Connectivity Solutions in this regard.

Conclusion

Appropriate data connectivity solutions and strategies always bring you advantages. You can optimize the developers’ productivity and reduce development costs. The right methods and tools are the most valid guarantees of accelerating the time-to-market values and reducing the project risks.

Follow Agile principles and facilitate team collaboration for better coordination. Prototype your products often and focus on simplicity in design. These strategies are suitable for reducing the time to market.

Use DevOps practices to optimize developer productivity. With their help, you can boost enterprise collaboration and hasten the delivery pipeline. Note also Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes. It optimizes developer productivity significantly. You can apply these principles to design, develop, integrate, test, deliver, and monitor software at high-speed.

The right approach towards developer productivity optimization and seamless data connectivity is crucial. It lets you improve time to market, customer experience, and the total cost of ownership.