Building outstanding digital products for solving specific problems is a demanding and time-consuming job. In the dynamic tech-driven era, professional developers have a lot on their plate.

They need to code in a creative manner, optimise their skills, learn new techniques, efficiently plan IT test environment management and deploy the software products within deadlines.

However, the journey of a developer might become more complex and less productive when they are forced to use tools or APIs that are beyond their skillset proficiency.

Consequently, the developer experiences burnout, and so does the quality of the product that’s under development.

Therefore, it is crucial for organisations and developers themselves to consider adopting specific processes to improve the level of productivity and experience with every project.

In this article, you will get a clear insight into some important ways that you can adopt to improve the developer experience and productivity.

What are the Ways You Can Adopt to Improve Developer Experience and Productivity?

Starting from onboarding the client and discussing the requirements to approaching development and software release management, a developer helps you complete the journey with the utmost quality considerations in mind.

Therefore, as a deciding authority or manager of an organisation, it becomes your responsibility to improve the developer experience and productivity.

Here are the three impactful ways to improve developer productivity:

Implement Automation for the Provisioning of Test Data

In the arena of IT test environment management, there is a mandatory process of provisioning & de-provisioning the test data for a specific project within the organisation. However, this aspect of test management undergoes a poor form of automation.

• In most cases, the Database Administrators are responsible for delivering the test data.
• And they have to spend ample time masking the sensitive data fields to meet the compliance regulations. This is essential before the test data goes to the development environment.
• It means that fulfilling the test data might take up to a few weeks to be ready for the developers to use them. This is a rapid drop in the level of productivity and experience for them!
• Therefore, implementing automation into the data delivery concept might reduce the overall wait and effort of developers.

Implement a Shift-Left Approach for Attaining Quality Assurance and Reduction in Count of Reworks

The shift-left approach to achieving quality in the product development process represents the implementation of QA activities at the initial stages of the life cycle.

• Early QA integration will reduce the overall cost of development and will help QA experts minimise the adverse impact of the defects.
• Such efforts would enhance the overall quality of the product and ensure optimal performance for the end-users.

However, the shift-left approach might add extra workloads for the developers, which might deteriorate their experience.

• This is because the developers will have to execute multiple unit tests and be part of various code reviews to detect quality bugs and fix them.
• Moreover, it also demands the developers to adopt skills for being able to use modern testing tools or frameworks. Therefore, the shifting-left approach should undergo correct execution, which will reduce the rate of reworks that developers must do.
• To avoid the execution pitfalls while implementing the shift-left method into development, you can provide the right automation scripts or tools to the developers alongside quality test data.
•  With this, you can ensure that there’s an optimal collaboration between developers and the QA teams.

Eliminate Friction while Building the Development Environments

One of the initial aspects of proper software release management is to create an efficient development environment. Every developer experiences a productivity halt because of the manual or error-prone approach to creating a development environment. As a result, the developers require a lot of time until they can finally be ready to contribute with codes.

• Consequently, the development environment will drift away from both staging and production aspects. This will make the code more prone towards developing bugs.
• Therefore, to improve the developer experience, the organisation must care to invest in specific ways to create reproducible and consistent development environments. For instance, Docker container solutions can be an ideal way to achieve this.           

Bottom Line

Enhancing the developer experience and productivity in terms of development and IT test environment management is a crucial factor for success.

However, in the quest to complete the project development steps quickly, organisations often let go of the important methods to streamline the developers’ productivity and experience.

These three ways specified above can help you implement the right strategies to enhance the experience and productivity quotient of developers and lead your business to bring in more success and performance with the projects.

Developers are the support system of an IT organisation; therefore, taking proactive steps to improve their productivity should be your top priority.