By Alex Circei, CEO and co-founder, Waydev.
getty
Although digital natives, software development companies still benefit from digital transformation processes that enable them to integrate data-driven decision-making into all business areas. As the general landscape becomes more competitive and the need for agility increases, tech leaders need to know how to master data and analytics as critical elements of their organization’s digital transformation.
When it comes to software development organizations, even the concept of digital transformation gets an upgrade, as it goes beyond adopting technology and using digital assets in innovative ways. In this industry, it’s mainly about changing traditional IT environments, replacing legacy systems with efficient cloud-based apps and implementing DevOps strategies. Once these are all set, the ultimate goal is to deploy strategies centered around data and analytics, so enterprises may generate the utmost value from them.
Top software development players understand that information is a leading asset, so they use it to gain a competitive advantage that supports their positioning as market leaders and pioneers. This is why they track, measure and constantly analyze data to increase development velocity and overall value. They use platforms that are dedicated to helping tech leaders gain visibility into their teams’ performance to support a continuous improvement mindset.
Objectives dictate the process, but how do you apply data-driven digital transformation to main objectives?
There are several objectives to aim for when implementing digital transformation with data. One of the most important is ensuring companies unify their tools, processes and analytics to create a seamless environment that supports intelligence-driven decision-making and smooth operations.
Still, as starting points always differ, there isn’t a single, one-size-fits-all recipe that enterprises may use when establishing these objectives. Each organization’s CIO is responsible for identifying engineering objectives and translating them into clear, transparent, measurable outcomes. Such an approach is suitable for operations and team morale as well, motivating professionals.
Digital transformation with data means comparing business goals against your organization’s deliverables. To do this, you can use data-driven solutions that automatically collect data from engineering tool stacks and give you complete visibility of your project.
• Implementation Of Agile Data-Driven Management
Agile data-driven management fosters flexibility and the constant use of business intelligence. To attain that, tech leaders place importance on automating performance reporting and on managing team activity.
In this context, tools that offer instant access to core engineering metrics and set baselines can help tech leaders achieve excellent results that transform operations. Visibility over workflows is a key element for assessing and improving your team’s dynamics and performance levels.
• Product Release Quality Increase
It’s on every tech leader’s to-do list to increase the quality of product releases and shorten sprints. For this, many will transform operations and streamline processes. This approach enables them to make the most of the tactics and tools that focus on reducing the number of bugs identified across the DevOps process, improving unit testing coverage, increasing sprint capacity or increasing the number of code reviews.
• Higher Product Performance
Digital transformation processes help tech leaders target higher product performance. For this, they need to assess their product’s key metrics, track them and identify ways of enhancing them. In these cases, tech leaders should focus particularly on reducing the number of critical bugs, increasing overall stability and creating product sheets with frequently asked questions.
Strategies For Software Development Enterprises
• Use it as a force multiplier to your organization’s digital transformation.
Digital transformation requires cultural transformation, a change in mindset that may be unlocked through DevOps. By combining development and operational principles and practices, DevOps expedites software delivery and helps organizations cut off silos, improve real-time collaboration between team members and innovate continuously.
DevOps also plays an integral part in automating operational environments, thus minimizing the risk of human errors and making the most of people’s time and skills. When team members don’t spend hours filling in reports, their expertise may be put to better work to solve issues and potential bottlenecks and develop excellent solutions.
Some tools can track and analyze continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines without requiring manual input, giving CIOs better visibility over the performance of DevOps tasks.
• Increase business velocity with cloud principles and operating models.
In today’s world, it is a challenge to keep up with stakeholders’ expectations using traditional on-premise tools. This is where cloud technologies and operating models come in. These help enterprises access a wide range of innovative products and services, reduce time-to-market and scale up and down to optimize operating costs.
The most successful CIOs I have worked with are never shy to take a step back to analyze their processes and assess how a cloud-operating model may help businesses expand their offerings, approach new markets and rapidly respond to market trends.
• Identify inefficiencies, risks and improvement areas.
Digital transformation comes with its share of advantages, but it also increases the risks associated with potential bugs and errors that may cause operational disruptions. These affect tech companies, leading to unfulfilled tasks and generating costs.
An efficient way of identifying inefficiencies and improvement areas is by analyzing code repositories. Some platforms can offer you visibility over the code base of Git providers while also using a pattern-matching engine. Moreover, by examining the size of the commit, the severity of code changes or how changes are made—if they are spread through a wider codebase surface or tightly grouped—tools may be able to search for anomalies that could escalate into issues.
Bring the data to digital transformation.
Digital transformation with data is a must in software development companies because it enables them to stay ahead of the curve and deliver continuous value to stakeholders. If you want to secure your company’s market leader and innovator position, make the most of tools and techniques that add business intelligence to your processes and daily flows.
