3 Simple Tactics to Continuously Improve your Software Development Process
In a recent interview with Will Osbourne , a technical team lead at Seven Hills Technology , he shared three tactical strategies to continuously improve your software development process. The three strategies he notes:
Sprint Retrospectives
If you've used Scrum before, this is likely nothing new to you. If you haven't... I don't believe you.
Using the Scrum methodology we perform sprints in two week periods with a retrospective at the conclusion of the sprint. During which we take time to review the work we've completed in the prior sprint period, discuss better ways to tackle technical challenges or improve process, or share strategies we employed during the sprint that really worked (or utterly failed) for us.
QA Handoff Videos
One strategy that Will's team tried, enjoyed, and implemented as standard process is the use of QA handoff videos. These are relatively self-explanatory. Before a developer finishes a story or puts it up for code review, they will record their screen and walk through the completed feature for the QA staff. This ensures that the QA has a very clear picture on what they're supposed to be testing and what they should expect to see.
A sneaky benefit of these videos is it forces developers to test. According to Will, there have been plenty of times he has sat down to record and found a bug, so he had to go back and fix it.
Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)
Seven Hills Technology employs the Entrepreneurial Operating System from EOS Worldwide to improve day-to-day operations. One facet of this system is weekly team lead meetings. During these meetings, all 10-or-so team leads gather to identify, discuss, and solve challenges that one or all of them may be facing. This is called IDS and is one of the concepts covered in the EOS manual.
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Benefits to the Organization
Our technical team leads found that sprint retrospectives and QA handoff videos benefits both sides of the development and QA process. It helped the QA work faster and the development team to push less bugs. So, this process was formalized for each story item.
During their weekly team lead meetings, the technical leads benefitted from hearing new challenges that they may not have encountered on their own or getting input from folks that have ran into similar issues in the past. Ultimately, helping to diversify the input team leads receive in problem solving and improve the development process across each of their projects.
Really enjoyed the article, especially the QA-handoff videos. I recently saw the Playwright framework being used in a JS project which is used for E2E testing. It can also record videos for your tests on its own that you can view!