DEV Community

charles hollins
charles hollins

Posted on • Edited on

Software Development Process Management Best Practices

You can choose any type of software development process management – best Waterfall, Scrum, or something else. But you should remember to stick to some theoretical practices in software development that ensure that you follow the basic rules in it. Following are significant rules that you can make use of in software development:

Clearly defining the roles of your team members
Your team will contain different expert individuals who should be informed clearly about the task that is going to be assigned to them and also informed about their responsibilities. Your team will have a (or multiple) software developer, tester, project manager, team leader, and others. Everyone should be made aware of their work boundaries.

Determine quality metrics and documentation strategies
There are many software development quality metrics like cyclomatic complexity, line of code, and others. The right metric should be chosen to base upon the type of software and used for periodical assessments.

For effective software development, you should choose a certain documentation strategy that clearly defines your documentation types like physical properties, document updates, version numerals, etc.

Performing issue tracking and testing
Issue tracking helps in understanding the scope of software and also provides a base for performing functional tests. Except for some like the user interface code, testing should be carried out for each unit. Other testing types like system, user integrations, etc. should be clearly defined and followed as per definitions. This will raise the quality standards and minimize bugs.

Perform version controls and code reviews
A version strategy should be predefined for consistent progress. It should include codes as well as other documents. The version strategy will make dependency management and versioning easier. Code review ensures that you produce high-quality codes. Also, a code prepared by an amateur developer when reviewed by an experienced developer on the team helps in learning for the new developers and at the same time ensures that you get high-quality codes for your work.

Define dependency management
Dependency management ensures that you include the external projects and libraries that are formed with the progress of the projects in a correct and precise manner. If it is not done correctly, then later version alterations and updates will cause problems and time wastage. Therefore, development management tools should be used in productivity enhancement.

Schedule meetings and keep a tab on the lessons learned from the project mistakes
You should have regular meetings and state if it’s for the entire team or some of the members who need to meet up frequently. This will also help in discussing project issues and plan out timely actions to get the job done smoothly.

Further, there can be any number of errors or configuration complexities that had created an obstacle in your project. Note them down and keep them for future reference so that they are not repeated in the future.

The efficacy of software development services is highly determined by the best practices they choose, irrespective of the management type.

Top comments (0)