How to Improve Development Velocity

Howdy, Upstarts!

In some of my previous articles, I have explained some core concepts for managing agile software development teams: User Stories and Story Points. These are important concepts that get bandied about quite a bit every time someone brings up SCRUM Development or KANBAN. My previous articles explained the concepts of User Stories and Story Points, as well as why they are both important for any engineering organization, particularly for startups. In this series of articles, I want to address an important metric that you can calculate, using the concepts of User Stories and Story Points: Development Velocity.

In this series of articles, I am discussing the concept of Development Velocity. In the first article of this series, I explained what Development Velocity is and why it is important. In the second article of this series, I explained how to measure Development Velocity. In this final article, I will explain 3 Best Practices that your startup can use to optimize and improve your engineering organization Development Velocity.

3 Best Practices

When I design an engineering organization, every action that I take and every decision that I make is focused on accelerating my startup. Many of my choices try to increase Development Velocity.

There are many different tactics that leaders can adapt to their own startup to accelerate their engineering organization's Development Velocity, but I have found that some of the best ways to increase the efficiency of your team are to implement three, quick, and simple best practices:

1. Write Down your Development Processes!

2. Never Reinvent the Wheel!

3. Capture your Business Knowledge!

To build a lean startup team, you should follow these three cardinal rules!

I know that these tips sound simple, but I cannot count the number of times that I have sat down with a software development team to review a deliverable, a proposal, or an organization and I have found one of these 3 Best Practices thrown out of the window.

Let’s dive into a deeper explanation of each of these!

Write Down your Development Processes!

I am a big fan of Corporate Processes! Good processes facilitate communication, understanding, and accountability, which makes your team move faster and with more agility.

I like to think of a good corporate process as a kind of scar tissue: when someone makes a mistake or there is inefficiency, companies make a new process. So knowledge of good processes comes from hard-won experience.

But without documenting those processes, it becomes impossible to improve them!

Defining the process allows you to measure each of the steps of the process, and then to optimize each step based on these measurements; however, if you do not have a defined process, then you cannot measure and optimize that process. So the first step to this optimization is simply to articulate your process.

Even though it is a simple thing, writing down your Development Process is the first step to improving it!

Never Reinvent the Wheel!

It’s really easy for people to get over-enthusiastic about their ideas. When I get excited about a new project, I often find myself explaining intricate systems and complex apparatuses… for sending an email.

Your startup does not create value with these pieces of boilerplate functionality!

And what’s more, there are plenty of existing solutions and code libraries that your development teams should be able to integrate or co-opt for your technology product.

I know that it can be easy to lose focus, but you must understand what value your startup brings, and focus your technology development on those sources of value. If you are a dating site, then your software development teams should focus on building models and algorithms, and not on emails or news feeds. With a little time and research, you can find existing versions of those solutions. This tactic will reduce the amount of original code that your development teams need to write, and it will prioritize the technology that will bring the most value to your startup.

You can accelerate your Development Velocity by prioritizing the developments that your company needs to own and identifying what work that your startup can avoid.

Documentation of Business Knowledge

Along with bugs, one of the main sources of inertia when it comes to improving Development Velocity is re-working code because of shifting or poorly articulated product requirements. The best way to avoid this is not to create better requirements templates, but rather to create a strong understanding of your business amongst your team.

By creating a foundation of business knowledge for every team member of your startup, you foster an environment in which developers, designers, and product managers can make good decisions independently. By empowering your team with the understanding of the business needs that are addressed by your technology product, you reduce the chances of confusion, the time required for explaining new features and increase Development Velocity.

Every Startup should take some time to write down the important fundamental concepts of its Business Model!

Documenting your core business knowledge makes communication more efficient, decision making quicker, and errors less likely.

Simple But Powerful!

Sometimes the simplest things are the most powerful!

Each of these 3 Best Practices sounds simple, but so often we allow ourselves to be drawn into complex situations and problems while we forget the simplest parts of our jobs!

I have witnessed each of these 3 Best Practices directly improve Development Velocity!

A high Development Velocity directly increases the probability that your startup will survive and flourish. So every founder should do whatever they can to accelerate the Development Velocity of their engineering organization.

By investing a little bit of time to implement these best practices in your own startup, you can set up your development teams to move quickly and efficiently towards your startup’s strategic goals!