Reducing Bottlenecks in Software Development with New Solutions

You want to deliver a flawless app to your stakeholders, not overwork your team members, and get to production within your allotted time frame. But wait, a bottleneck appears. 

And now you have to identify and fix it before it costs you all that time, effort, resources, and money you and your team put into it. 

How exactly do you identify where your bottleneck is, and what do you need to do after identifying it? 

In this article, we explain how to reduce common bottlenecks you come across in software development and share how Bunnyshell’s Environment as a Service solution can help. 

Bottlenecks can occur no matter how “well-oiled” your machine is. That’s why it’s crucial to focus on identifying and reducing them rather than avoiding them altogether (they will happen, and you won’t know how to fix them if you aren’t prepared). The longer you wait for a solution, the costlier and more time-consuming it will be. Below you’ll find some common bottlenecks software development teams struggle with.  

App development bottlenecks occur when development efforts don’t meet the business demands. Sometimes, they occur because of miscommunication or misunderstanding between developers and stakeholders on the needs and goals of a project. This not only slows down the business, but your team won’t be able to react to changes as they happen, and stakeholders will be disappointed and may consider other teams for future projects if the final app is not up to par. 

To combat this:

Another method to prevent this bottleneck is to encourage communication and collaboration among team members. Remember, the success of a dev project depends on communication. Have digital communication channels open, hold regular meetings to assign and assess roles and tasks, and give team members opportunities to improve their communication, empathy, and collaboration skills by enrolling in soft skill development programs. 

A great way to succeed in these scenarios is to use ephemeral environments. With these environments, stakeholders can be a part of the development process, avoiding miscommunication issues and minimizing rework, thanks to the ability to identify quality issues earlier in the development cycle. Other team members can collaborate and offer feedback as the app is being built and don’t have to wait for the finished product to view changes.      

The correct tools improve efficiency and productivity for your entire team. Not investing in the tools your team needs (or any tools at all) is counterproductive and won’t benefit your team or stakeholders. You can use tools to automate, for education purposes, and even find bottlenecks, making them indispensable. 

With an EaaS solution, you can offer your team tools that can automate menial tasks and help them quickly adapt to new tech and overcome skills gaps. Additionally, SysAdmin tools are necessary for dev teams, allowing them to troubleshoot, test, communicate, and not only. Take a look at the 22 Essential Admin Tools You Need in 2021. 

Somewhere along the production line, one or more team members are feeling overwhelmed. While staff burnout isn’t necessarily a bottleneck in its own right, overworked team members can impact other environment bottlenecks. Not paying attention to this is a huge mistake. While it’s critical to identify the necessary skill-sets for your team and hire appropriately, even the teams maximizing each member’s potential sometimes don’t know how to properly motivate those who are struggling (like not encouraging communication or investing in the correct tools). 

Not being able to move on to the next step because a developer is falling behind or holding up the rest of the team is not a good feeling for anyone and can lead to a lower team velocity and slower time-to-market. This can hurt your bottom line, cost you time and resources, and impact other stakeholders as well. Read about How to Build a High-Velocity Dev Team to further avoid these issues. 

The solution to this is to automate everything you can. Have your team members make a list of any repetitive activities that they regularly perform that don’t require too much thought process or essential decision making. Additionally, have them include any time-consuming tasks that include manual data entry. Have your more qualified devs spend a bit of extra time automating those meaningless tasks, so they never have to spend time on them again and instead focus on more important ones. You may then use an Environment as a Service solution to create automated, scalable, cost-effective environments that offer you better control and visibility at every step of the development process.  

Different team members may want to modify code in feature branches because they know they have to find bugs early in the development cycle to avoid costly and time-consuming rework. Before merging to the master branch, a team member wants to first test the branch with new code in isolation to ensure everything is running smoothly. However, they can’t find an environment to test the branch in. 

This is where a bottleneck appears. When you need environments to test all of your feature branches to go to production faster, but there aren’t enough, you need to come up with a more practical and cost-effective solution. Environment as a Service is an excellent solution to easily and quickly create multiple environments while allowing you to test branches in parallel without affecting other environments.  

Environment as a Service uses advanced automation to deploy and test all app components to ease teamwork, rework, and time-consuming implementations. Bottlenecks will be a thing of the past as you continue to increase production with faster time-to-market, collaboration and communication with your team and stakeholders, and using the correct tools for your needs. 

Bunnyshell allows you to focus on what’s important to you and future-proof your business with an EaaS solution. Remember that an EaaS solution can improve velocity more than any other platform implementation. Decrease your bottlenecks, remove rework, and become more efficient.