Continuous Improvement Process Examples/ Ideas — From my My Software Engineering Days

I recall some of the continuous improvement ideas that I instituted as a software engineering manager and heading a major product/application (Applicant Tracking System) from development, maintenance standpoint. This was couple of years back. For couple of years ATS product remained major revenue generator for us. Thanks to the team I had on the R&D, OPS side along with brilliant professional services resources we had to manage client implementations and relationships.

The major challenges happened as scaling of customers acquisition happened fast and we had few key members quit. There were numerous factors contributing to the instability of the application.

When I took in charge of that product, I brought my previous experience and instituted some key processes, checklists in an agile manner.

Documentation of processes — I started to put critical processes on paper.

a. Configuration Management

b. Release Management

c. Production support

d. Defect Handling

e. Coding Guidelines etc.

Focus on Fixing the current issues — We examined all the logs and prioritized all current bugs from the current usage of the application.

a. As we started to clear the existing errors for the application, this helped us to focus on further improvements.

Classification of Errors

a. The classification of errors into various categories and root cause helped us to easily identify and resolve any such future occurrences.

b. It saved us time when similar kind of error came next time.

Simplifying the application Footprint

a. We started to eliminate the legacy technologies by rewriting the code.

b. The lines of code started to reduce and things started to become more manageable.

c. The other thing was we need not to look for resources who could help with those legacy technologies anymore.

d. The core skill set of the team was enough to support now the entire infrastructure.

Stability First Attitude — The application needs to be stable first and perform consistently at the user’s hands.

a. We were putting lots of effort in terms of outages handling and troubleshooting outages.

b. As we started to eliminate root causes one by one contributing to application instability, we didn’t need to jump onto emergency calls and all people trying to troubleshoot the same issue.

c. Previously, lot of effort was getting wasted in this.

Coding Guidelines and Best practices

a. We researched best practices for the language the application was written in, reviewed the code smartly.

b. For example: Properly scoping the variables was one big thing.

c. We worked on to make sure that code throws errors when needed, made code more readable and enhanced performance by SQL tuning and other best practices.

d. We prioritized the item in short-term and long-term buckets.

Production problems handling procedure

a. We ensured immediate availability of QA for testing the application after emergency fixes etc.

b. If problem occurred at night / weekend — We had a plan to for team to become available as needed so as to avoid it snowballing as customers start to use the application next day/ Monday.

Notifications

a. We pressed for automatic notifications from Operations whether it was DB deadlock alerts or page not reachable alerts in case of application going down.

Building Knowledge Base

a. The cross functional knowledge training sessions within the team for the areas less known to each other were proposed and held.

b. I made sure that team creates the documentation and puts it on a shared drive.

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