DEV Community: 7pace

7 Negative Effects of Micromanagement on Software Teams

Devs @ 7pace — Wed, 26 May 2021 12:46:24 +0000

If you’ve never experienced it, you’re lucky.

Trying to work with a manager standing behind your shoulder, breathing down your neck while you’re just trying to get tasks done.

A manager who checks in constantly, giving unnecessary directions at every step of every project.

Or a manager who assigns you a creative task, then gives such explicit, step-by-step instructions that there’s no longer any room for the creativity that’s required to do a good job.

Micromanagement is frustrating and counter-productive in any industry, but especially for software teams.

Engineers who do great work are the ones who can problem-solve, delegate, and change directions on the fly — whatever it takes to get projects finished and applications deployed. But under a micromanaging supervisor, those things become so much more difficult — if not impossible.

The negative effects of micromanagement can destroy software teams, and we’ll explain how later in this article. We also have alternatives to micromanaging — things managers can do to reverse the damaging effects of micromanagement.

What Is Micromanagement?

What counts as micromanagement, versus just being a leader who’s involved in the day-to-day work their team is doing?

It’s a fine line for managers, but it’s important to know when it’s being crossed.

Put simply, micromanagement is pretty much what it sounds like: When a manager tries to control everything about their team, a situation, a project, or a place. But what micromanagement looks like in practice can really vary.

Here’s a useful litmus test: If members of your team feel like their ability to get work done is impeded by constantly needing to check in, provide progress reports, or receive feedback from their manager, they’re being micromanaged.

And while having close control over a team’s work like this might seem like a good thing, it can actually have downright disastrous effects on the team and its work.

How Micromanagement Negatively Affects Software Teams

In a 2004 study, nearly 80 percent of workers said they’ve experienced micromanagement at some point in their careers. But the fact that micromanagement is so common doesn’t make it any less damaging.

What are some of the common, negative effects of micromanagement? These are just a few of them, but really, there’s no limit to how this bad management habit can affect your team.

Poor Job Performance

That same 2004 study that showed that nearly four in five workers has experienced micromanagement? It also showed some of the ways this practice can negatively affect a workplace — 71 percent of workers in that survey said being micromanaged had interfered with their job performance.

And if you think about that, it makes sense. Team members whose time is being used up giving frequent reports to an overbearing manager aren’t going to be able to get into their flow and do good work. Micromanagement kills any ability teams have of doing deep work.

Decreased Morale

That study also showed how micromanagement can affect team morale — 85 percent of workers surveyed said their morale had suffered because of being micromanaged. Workplace morale is also tied to things like job performance and productivity, so when it suffers, so does the overall work.

Higher Turnover

In the 2004 study, 69 percent of workers said they had considered changing jobs because of micromanagement, and another 36 percent — more than a third — said they actually had changed jobs. Micromanagement can lead directly to higher turnover, which is not only expensive in terms of the money your organization will spend recruiting and training new team members — it’s also costly in terms of the lost teamwork and flow that comes with a lot of turnover.

Decreased Teamwork

On that note, micromanaging can kill teamwork, with or without high turnover. The best teams are the ones that can problem-solve together, and when their work is interrupted by constant check-ins or feedback from an overbearing manager, team members won’t be able to depend on each other like they should.

Less Innovation

Teams that are micromanaged don’t have the freedom necessary to find new and better ways to do their work or solve problems for their end users. Micromanagement means that your organization will be less able to innovate — something that’s necessary in software development.

More Stress and Burnout

And finally, micromanagement can create stress and anxiety for your teammates, and cause them to burn out quickly. Working in an organization or team that has low morale, isn’t product, and can’t innovate will wear down any developer over time.

Stop Micromanaging. Do This Instead

If only it were so easy to stop micromanagement as just saying, “Don’t micromanage your teams.” Micromanagement is a bad habit that often runs deep, and managers who want to unlearn it might need to do serious work before they can shake off the habit for good. Here are some things they can practice to start moving away from micromanaging tendencies.

Make Great Hires

The first step toward letting go of a micromanagement habit? Building a team that definitely doesn’t need to be micromanaged.

Organizations need strong hiring processes in place, including recruiting efforts and involvement from team members on multiple levels to ensure that new hires have the right skills and are a good fit for the team. The organization can also make changes that will attract the best workers, like offering competitive pay, great benefits, flexible hours or remote work, and other perks.

Offer Guidance Instead of Specific Directions

When giving teams new project to work on, make sure they understand the goal they’re trying to accomplish. If they need to be pointed in the right direction, offer them guidance or advice. But resist the urge to give them step-by-step instructions for how you would do the job.

In other words, make sure everyone is on the same page about what the end result needs to be, and then trust your team members to find the best way to get there.

Promote Autonomy in your Workplace

Jack Welch, the chairman and CEO of General Motors who navigated the company through some of its most successful years, is often quoted about his method of managing his employees: “Communicate your ideas, distribute resources, and get out of the way.”

Welch was well-known for giving GM’s workers a ton of autonomy, and that was part of why the company flourished.

Your team members will likely also flourish if you can build a culture of autonomy in your workplace. Instead of holding team members accountable for following specific directions or doing tasks your way, hold them accountable for solving problems and building applications that work for your users. The way to get there is up to the people who are actually doing the job: The developers.

Give Team Members the Right Resources

And finally, it’s important to make sure your team members have the right resources to succeed when they’re working autonomously. One great resource? A time tracking solution that will help them learn about their own work styles and become better at their jobs.

Time tracking shouldn’t be about micromanaging the time your team members spend in their chairs at the office. It should be about gleaning data from sprints and projects, and using that data to become more efficient, better predict timelines for projects, and become better teams.

Leading > Micromanaging

Many managers think their job is all in the name: To manage their teams. But the best managers know there’s more to it than that — that their job is to lead their teams toward their own success. As Jack Welch, the GM CEO, put it, “Communicate your ideas, distribute resources, and get out of the way.”

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence: How People Like Steve Jobs Use Science to Become Better Speakers

Devs @ 7pace — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 13:11:58 +0000

Watch a Steve Jobs speech, and just try not to get chills.

He’s regarded as one of the most electrifying speakers of our time, and for good reason — something about the way he communicates his revolutionary ideas is just so effective.

It’s not on accident.

Actually, Steve Jobs used a popular framework for crafting even his most famous speeches and presentations — and anyone can use that framework, too.

It’s called Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, and some of history’s best public speakers have used it to become great.

Anyone can use the steps laid out in Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to help them create an effective speech or presentation. But many developers are likely to wonder why they should bother. They write code. They don’t present.

But they should.

Developers can (and should) learn to be better speakers, and we’re going to tell you why — and then how to do it.

Why Should Developers Bother Learning to Speak and Present?

We know what you’re thinking right now.

I get paid to write code, not talk about it.

That may be true. But developers should learn the basics of public speaking anyway, even if it’s not a regular part of their job. The reason? It can make them better at things that are part of their job.

If you think about it, public speaking is really just getting your ideas across effectively to a crowd of people. If you ever have to convince your manager or team to do something related to a work project, public speaking skills can help you.

And then, of course, there are the ways this skill can help advance your career. If you have any future management ambitions, consider how often managers have to lead meetings and direct or inspire their teams. Public speaking skills will go a long way toward getting you ready for a managerial role.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence: The Key to Moving, Convincing Presentations

Even for developers who have done very little of it, public speaking isn’t as hard as you might think to master. Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is a popular framework for crafting a speech, and it’s been used to great success by some of the best public speakers of our time, like Steve Jobs and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In fact, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, who summed it up this way: “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.”

That’s the basic idea behind Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, though the more modern version of the strategy adds a few steps that are meant to appeal to your audience emotionally and drive them to take action — two important parts of any speech or presentation.

Here are the steps included in Monroe’s Motivated Sequence as it exists today.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence: 5 Steps to a Great Speech

Step 1: Get the Audience’s Attention

A Monroe’s Motivated Sequence speech always begins with a great attention-grabber. This can come in many different forms. You could:

Tell a story;
Tell a joke;
Share a surprising fact or statistic;
Make a shocking statement.

Anything that makes the audience sit up and pay attention is perfect. And remember that people have short attention spans. Keep this part of the speech brief — once you have your audience’s attention, move on quickly.

Step 2: Establish the Need

Now it’s time to tell the audience why you’re speaking to them: You need something from them. State the problem clearly, in a way that makes the audience feel uncomfortable or dissatisfied.

When you make statements about problems or opportunities, back them up as much as possible with facts, figures, and statistics. This step of the sequence is all about getting the audience to see and agree that something needs to change.

Step 3: Satisfy the Need

Now for the most important part of your speech: You’re going to tell and show your audience how you can satisfy or solve the need.

During this step, you should:

Lay out your plan, but do so concisely. Remember that your audience is full of people with short attention spans.
Keep the audience engaged by using stories to show how your solution will solve the discomfort or dissatisfaction they felt earlier.
Think about any counter-arguments or objections people might have to your plan, and address them in advance.

Step 4: Visualize the Future

Next, you want to really sell the audience on your solution. Help them visualize your solution in action, and see how it will make things better.

There are three common visualization methods used for Monroe’s Motivated Sequence:

Positive Visualization: Show the audience what their world will look like if your solution is adopted.
Negative Visualization: Show the audience what their world will look like if your solution is not adopted.
Contrast Visualization: Start by describing the negative visualization, then show the audience they have another option by describing the positive visualization.

Step 5: Call to Action

And finally, conclude your speech by telling your audience what their next step should be if they want to move toward your solution. You don’t need to create an entire roadmap for them — just tell them the first step to take.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence in Action: The 2007 iPhone Reveal

Now let’s look at a classic speech that put Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to work.

This is the speech that Steve Jobs gave in 2007 when he announced the first iPhone. Watch the speech, and then we’ll break down the ways he used the five steps in Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.

Step 1: Get the Audience’s Attention

“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two-and-a-half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. One is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world.”

By calling the audience’s attention to the fact that Apple has already revolutionized technology a number of times, Jobs gets their attention by promising that another revolutionary product is about to be unveiled.

Step 2: Establish the Need

“The most advanced phones are called smartphones… The problem is that they’re not so smart and they’re not so easy to use.”

Jobs shows the audience pictures of existing smartphones, which had clunky plastic keyboards and styluses at the time. He explains how their UIs weren’t intuitive, and updating them was a struggle because of their hardware. He established a need for a better smartphone — one that was actually smart and easy to use.

Step 3: Satisfy the Need

Throughout much of the presentation, Jobs explained why Apple’s new iPhone was different and better.

It used a multi-touch touchscreen, a revolutionary new piece of technology that eliminated plastic keyboards and allowed users to use their fingers instead of a stylus.

It used software that was based on Apple’s desktop OS, making it intuitive and easy-to-use.

And it combined three things that customers wanted in a portable device in that year: a music player, a phone, and an internet device that they could use to surf and check emails.

Step 4: Visualize the Future

“It’s at least five years ahead of any other phone.”

Jobs already knows that by explaining the features of the iPhone, he’s going to command the attention of his audience. But he helps them visualize how important this new piece of technology is by dropping this line: “It’s at least five years ahead of any other phone.”

In other words, you can wait five years to have a tool this good, or you can have it right now with an iPhone.

Step 5: Call to Action

Unfortunately, that YouTube clip cuts off before the end of Jobs’ speech where he calls his audience to action. But we know what came next. The iPhone became ubiquitous, and today, millions of customers use them because of their cutting-edge technology and user-friendly interface.

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is the Key to Speaking Like Steve Jobs

Despite his reputation for being an incredible public speaker, any of us can be like Steve Jobs. He simply knew how to arrange a speech to capture his audience and sell them on his idea. With Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, you can do the same.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

How Much Work Can You Really Get Done?

Devs @ 7pace — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 10:53:00 +0000

We’ve all been there.

You arrive at work, feeling good and ready to tackle a monster list of tasks.

You’ve planned out pages of items to get done.

You get your coffee, you settle in, and you get to work.

But by lunch time, something has become clear: Even though you’re feeling productive and on top of your game, this long to-do list isn’t getting done.

Don’t blame yourself — it’s human nature to overestimate how much work we can really get done. And for knowledge workers in particular, the amount of work we can really do in a day is typically far less than we would think.

There’s a lot of debate about how much work people are actually capable of doing in a day, but one thing is clear: Almost no one can work for eight straight hours. So how much work can you really get done? Let’s look at what science says.

How Many Productive Hours Can Knowledge Workers Actually Work?

There’s a much-quoted study that shows that knowledge workers are only productive for three hours per day. But is that really accurate?

Since every worker is different, and every job is different, there’s no single number of hours that represents a limit to how much work a person can do in one workday. Different people have different stamina, which is also heavily affected by the difficulty of the tasks at hand.

But most experts agree that it isn’t reasonable to expect anyone to work productively for eight hours straight, five days a week. Most studies point to an average amount of work for knowledge workers being anywhere from three to six hours in each eight-hour workday.

Software teams are likely to already know this, since sprint planning usually accounts for about four hours of work per team member per day.

So is this an excuse for knowledge workers like software developers to clock three hours at their desks and then call it a day?

You probably already know the answer to that.

Knowing our own natural limitations is a great way to fight back against the always-on-the-clock culture that dominates many of today’s workplaces. But it can also serve as a tool to become more productive — by knowing how many hours we can effectively work in a day, we can better prioritize and allocate those hours to tasks and projects that need to get done soonest.

How to Track How Much Time You Actually Work

In order to learn how to work smarter, you first need a baseline — you need to know how many hours you actually tend to spend working productively each day.

For that, you need a time tracker that can stay out of your way, tracking your time while you just get your work done. Even better if that time tracker can provide you with data about your work, so you can have more insight into your pace and productivity.

7pace Timetracker does both of those things.

Built for Azure DevOps and Github, 7pace Timetracker integrates seamlessly into your workflow and stays right where you need it: Out of your way. It can measure your work and track your progress on everything from entire projects to individual work items, which gives you a much clearer picture of exactly how many hours you spend being productive than many other traditional time tracking methods.

Using 7pace Timetracker will help you determine how much productive time you’re spending at your desk each day, and from there, you can determine whether you want to adopt new habits to get more out of your work hours.

How to Work Smarter — Not Longer

Knowing how many hours you spend being productive currently is just a starting point. But we already know that if you’re being productive for anywhere between three and six hours per day, you probably won’t be able to increase that number much, if at all. So if you want to get the most out of your productive time at work, you’ll need to work smarter, not longer.

Have Realistic Expectations

Step one: Don’t set your expectations sky-high. Yes, most knowledge workers can probably pick up new skills that will help them boost their productivity. But the whole point we’re trying to make here is that knowledge work is hard, and humans have natural limits to how much of it they can do in a day. Try to set realistic goals for boosting your productivity at work.

Learn to Say No

One common productivity killer? Saying yes to every ask and task that comes across your desk.

A big part of working smarter is prioritizing your time to just do the most important and high-priority work you can. That means saying no to tasks that aren’t as pressing as the ones already on your to-do list.

Take More Breaks

It may sound counter-productive, but it’s backed up by science: Knowledge workers often get more work done when they take more frequent breaks.

The reason for this is that knowledge work is hard. It’s draining. It takes a ton of mental stamina. If you can strategically step away throughout the day to give your brain a break from the heavy lifting, you’ll be able to do more — for longer. It’s like running a long distance. You’ll be able to go further if you keep a reasonable pace and rest when needed, rather than trying to sprint the entire time.

But Don’t Overdo Your Breaks

Be careful not to have too much of a good thing. Taking periodic breaks throughout your work day will help you boost your productivity, but taking too many breaks, or stepping away for too long at a time is a surefire way to make sure you never get anything done.

To find a break pattern that works for you, try experimenting with Pomodoro cycles. The standard is 25 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break, repeated throughout the day. If a 5-minute break seems too short, or if 25 minutes isn’t enough time to get into your flow, experiment with longer cycles — say, 2 hours of deep work followed by a half-hour break. Follow that cycle for an eight-hour work day, and you’ll have spent six total hours doing productive deep work.

Make Your Deadlines Realistic

Another important part of working smarter is setting yourself up for success, and that means not setting deadlines you can’t meet. It can be tempting to set a short deadline to force yourself to get more work done in a short period of time, but this is a quick way to burn yourself out, not increase your productivity.

Ask for Accountability

When setting goals at work, it can always help to work together with a team member toward bettering yourself. Ask someone if they can help out by holding you accountable to work toward your productivity goals. Better yet, see if you have a teammate who wants to set similar goals, so you can hold each other accountable.

Take Care of Your Body

And finally, an important part of maximizing your productivity is making sure you take care of yourself, both at work and at home. Get enough sleep each night. Eat healthy meals regularly throughout the day. Drink lots of water. If you feel stressed or burnt out, that’s a sign that you’re pushing too hard, and your goals may be beyond your natural limits. Listen to that, if it happens.

How Much Work Can You Really Get Done?

By following these tips, you should be on the path toward maximizing your own time spent at work each day. But remember that productivity is deeply individual, and to recognize that all people have different limits to how much they can really get done.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Best Places to Work: What List-Making Tech Companies Have In Common

Devs @ 7pace — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 10:35:20 +0000

It’s that time of year — when publications like Glassdoor, Fortune, and Forbes announce their annual lists of the best places in the world to work.

Every year, maybe unsurprisingly, tech companies fill the top spots. But why? What is it that makes tech companies (and the other companies that make the lists) places so many people want to work?

Well, we definitely know that companies need to be of a certain size and influence to make one of these big lists — there are certainly small companies out there that are wonderful places to work and will never land on a Best Of list simply because they fly under the radar. What matters is creating a work environment that’s so loved by your teams — and that fosters such quality work — that you don’t need to make a list to know you work at one of the best companies in the world.

So whatever the size of your company, let’s look at the kinds of things that “Best Places to Work” companies all have in common — and how any company can put them into practice to become a better place to work.

Best Places to Work: The Basics

First things first: There are some things a company just has to offer if it wants to be considered a great place to work.

Now for the good news: For the most part, any successful, profitable company should be able to offer these basics to its teams.

Competitive Compensation

While it’s true that there’s more to satisfaction at work than just pay, it’s also true that your team members won’t do their best work or be happy if they’re constantly struggling to pay their bills and meet their basic needs. So that’s step one: Ensure that pay for even your lowest-paid team members will cover a decent standard of living in your area.

Step two? Ensuring that your compensation is competitive with similarly sized companies where people do similar work. Any company that strives to be aa truly great place to work needs to start here: paying people what they’re worth.

Good Benefits (and Maybe Some Perks, Too)

In addition to salaries and pay, be sure to offer competitive benefits, as well. This will vary depending on what’s standard in your area, but at a minimum, consider things like health benefits, paid vacation time, paid leave for new parents, and retirement accounts with employer matching.

In addition to basic benefits, consider some perks that are designed to help keep your team members happy and engaged. Things like healthy catered lunches from time to time, local gym memberships, education or book credits, and flexible hours or telecommuting are good ideas, but these can be customized to what will be most appealing to your teams.

Opportunities to Grow and Advance

Another necessary part of being a great workplace is making sure there’s a clear ladder that team members can climb if they’re interested in advancing within the organization. If that isn’t possible, at the very least, companies can provide training and engagement that helps their team members grow their skills and learn new ones.

Transparent Leadership

An important part of keeping team morale high and making your company a place people want to work is having transparency throughout the entire organization — but particularly in leadership. According to Forbes, organizations where trust in leadership is high are 2.5 times more likely to be high functioning.

That means being transparent about the company’s goals and direction. It also means keeping open lines of communication across the organization. For a team to function at its best, it needs to be united and working toward a common goal, and transparency from leadership all the way down to the lowest levels of your teams will support that.

Challenging and Exciting Work that Has an Impact

And lastly, companies where people love to work don’t stick their team members doing rote or menial work. Sure, there may be some menial tasks involved in every job — you can’t always avoid that. But whenever possible, you should strive to place team members in positions where they have work that challenges and excites them.

One way to keep team members engaged and excited about their work is to always clearly demonstrate the impact that it has — how it’s helping the company move toward shared goals that will benefit everyone.

How the Best Places to Work Become Even Better

Like we said, those things in the first part of this list were just the basics. Those are the minimum that a company should be offering to be considered a great place to work.

Now it’s time to raise the bar.

There are even more things companies can do to create more inclusive, collaborative, and healthy work environments. These are the things those big tech companies that top the lists are known for.

They’re harder to implement, because in most cases, these are intangible values that are powered by a company’s overall culture. But by embracing these values and putting them into practice every day, for every member of your team, you can all but guarantee you’ll have a workplace that your teams love to be a part of.

An Environment Where Employees Feel Valued

In a company that’s among the best places to work, employees should always know how valued they are — and how critical they are to the organization’s success.

That’s why it’s so necessary to reward team members for work well done, and guide them toward success should they stumble. Transparency and open communication will help uphold these values, too.

A People First Culture

At the besst places to work, valuable members of the team should be considered more important than maximizing profits. Work-life balance and well-being should be encouraged for all members of the team, from the top to the bottom.

In addition, team members should always feel empowered to pursue their passions at work. They’re there to fulfill their job duties, yes, but if they have something to offer that can benefit the organization outside of the job they were hired for, that should be encouraged, too.

Mission-Driven Company Cultures

The best companies go beyond just having a mission statement.

Workers who value what their company stands for are 54 percent more likely to stay in their jobs for more than five years. And 30 percent more mission-driven workers grow into high performers, compared to those who only work for a paycheck.

In other words, your team members want their employer to have values they can stand behind.

A Diverse, Inclusive Workforce

Similarly, your team members want to work for a company that hires diverse candidates for jobs and fosters an environment that is inclusive to all. In 2021, does anything more need to be said about that?

Constant Innovation

The best places to work should also be constantly striving to become even better. To compete with the companies that make the lists, your organization should be constantly innovating in how it creates the best possible work environment. It should also be iterating and improving on the new things it tries — constantly.

Ownership and Autonomy for Teams

This is a big one that we often preach here at 7pace: Good teams do their best work when they’re given autonomy and ownership over their projects and goals.

If you provide the best possible place to work, you should easily attract employees who don’t need to be micromanaged at work. Giving them autonomy and ownership over their work will only spur them to do better, benefitting the organization while they’re at it.

As the old saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. Let that be true of your organization, and your team is sure to feel like they have the best place to work.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

The Optimized You: Self-Improvement Via Time Tracking

Devs @ 7pace — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 09:18:29 +0000

Punching the clock.

Time monitoring.

Real-time surveillance.

There are a lot of terms — and tools, unfortunately — out there for tracking time that are less than positive.

And it’s not hard to see why when time tracking is more and more often being used as a means to “boost productivity” by toxic companies and managers, especially as remote work becomes more the norm and less the outlier.

But the thing they don’t get is that time tracking really isn’t a great tool for determining how productive you or your team are (In fact, here’s a much better way to measure productivity.).

What time tracking is a great tool for is self-improvement.

Hard to believe?

We certainly get how it can be for developers who are only familiar with the aforementioned noxious workplaces.

All we ask is that you put any preconceived notions aside for the length of this article and let us tell you about the wonderful world of optimizing yourself via healthy and effective time tracking habits.

Beware the Trap of Over Optimizing Your Time

Wait, the “trap” of optimization?

But didn’t we just say the whole point of this article is to teach you about optimization?!

Yes, we did promise optimization — and optimization we will deliver. What we won’t be doing is hyping up over optimization of your time.

In a world where both the fear of and the solution to being “inadequate” is sold to you in every social media scroll and visit to the front page of Medium.com, we want to warn you against the trap of optimizing your time in oblivion.

People don’t often use the phrase “over optimization,” but we all know it when we see it.

Colleagues one-upping each other over who gets the least sleep every night so they can hit the gym at 4 a.m. before cooking a four-course vegan breakfast and making it to their full-time job by 6.

The so-called influencers using their platforms to brag about how much “sacrifice” and “hustle” it took them to achieve their goals (and then turning around and selling you their success “secrets” for a reasonable fee!).

Over optimizing your time so that there’s none left for the things that recharge you — family time, passion projects, sleep — isn’t going to get you much in the long run besides anxious, exhausted, distracted, and maybe even fired.

That’s not the mentality we’re talking about here.

This article, just like our time tracking software and our company as a whole, is all about helping you better understand a paramount part of life — how you spend your time living it — so that you can make informed decisions on where to make improvements and optimizations in order to meet your goals.

With that out of the way, let’s explore several leading ways that time tracking can help us improve our lives and how exactly to use time tracking software to make it happen.

5 Ways Time Tracking Can Assist In Self-Improvement

If you’ve been traumatized in the past by managers who breathe down your neck about “punching the clock,” it can be hard to see the upsides of tracking your time.

However, there are many ways in which tracking time can help you improve yourself both at home and at work.

Overcome Procrastination

People who work within a team are probably familiar with all the administrative and back-and-forth communication tasks that really don’t take all that long to do yet somehow always seem to pile up into a mountain of dread if ignored.

That’s where David Allen’s popular “two-minute rule” comes in. If you come across a task that’s relevant to what you’re currently working on and you can get it totally off your plate in the span of two minutes, complete the task immediately.

The two-minute rule should help you avoid all the wasted time and mental energy that comes with filing tasks away to re-evaluate and complete later. On a larger scale, it may also help you overcome your fear of tackling your to-do list and create momentum on other, bigger tasks you’ve been putting off.

The thing is, you’ll never know how long any given task will take if you don’t track how long it takes you to do it a few times. After tracking your time for a bit, you’ll develop a skill for realistically estimating how long certain things should take you and if you should tackle them right away or not.

Prioritize Your Tasks to Prioritize Your Life

At its core, time tracking is a way to understand how you spend the finite minutes you get in life.

When you have a clear understanding of how many of those minutes certain tasks take, you can take a hard look at what’s worth your life’s time and what isn’t.

You’ll likely learn as you track your time more closely that the things you spend the longest doing aren’t the things you would say are the most important in your life. And if that’s the case, you’ll know where to start when it comes to optimizing how you’re getting certain things done (switching from manual to automated processes, hiring another set of hands) and deprioritizing other things.

In this way, time tracking plays a role in prioritizing not just your tasks but ultimately your life over your to-do list.

Become More Aware of Your Peak Productivity Periods

We know you were waiting for it — our nerdy moment of the day!

Meet ultradian rhythms: Biological cycles that take place over the course of 24 hours (as opposed to circadian rhythms in which only one cycle is completed per day).

Research on ultradian rhythms in humans seems to indicate that our bodies go through somewhat regular, daily cycles in which they’re predisposed to either rest or productivity.

This means that if you can slice and dice your time tracking information — more on the importance of this later — to understand how long certain tasks take you and at what time of day you’re doing them, you should be able to identify your ultradian rhythms and plan the best time of day to really get stuck into deep tasks and when it’s better to tackle lighter work like finding the best animal gifs.

Plan Your Days More Effectively

As we mentioned above, tracking your time is majorly helpful in deciding what tasks you can get done in the moment to beat back personal and workplace procrastination and overwhelm.

On the flip side, it’s also helpful in deciding what to do with all those tasks that will take over two minutes but still have to get done at some point.

When you have a good idea of how long key duties will take as well as a grasp on your productive periods throughout the day, you can lay out a day’s worth of work in a way that will improve its chances of actually getting done.

Grow Your Skills — And Uncover Skill Gaps

Getting faster at completing a task is usually a reliable way to show you’re getting better at it, but knowing you’re getting faster is only possible if you’re committed to regular time tracking.

If you find that you’re getting better and quicker at a specific task but the workflow that it’s part of doesn’t seem to be moving any faster, you may have uncovered an area where you or others on your team can uplevel in other skills and improve the entire process.

How to Effectively Track Your Time for Continuous Self-Improvement

Knowing how to physically track your time is the final step in optimizing your life by using time tracking.

Make the Task of Time Tracking Easy

We’re lucky to live in an era when lots of great software exists to automate menial tasks so we can spend more of our valuable time on tasks that are important to us.

One such piece of great software for the workplace is our very own 7pace Timetracker, a time tracking solution that works seamlessly with Azure DevOps tools (and will soon work with Github, too) to automate time tracking by either work item or issue.

What sets 7pace Timetracker apart from similar tools? It’s easy to integrate into your workflow, it’s easy to use to record time, and it’s even easy to generate reports from so you can get a deep look into how you’re using and optimizing your time.

Make Time Tracking a Habit

Time tracking is only truly effective when done on a regular basis. However, we all know how hard it can be to turn a new goal into a long-lasting habit.

If you need a little help, here’s a quick version of our own recommended process for developing a habit:

Step 1: Start small

Step 2: Connect a new habit to a habit you already perform regularly

Step 3: Accept that you’ll face roadblocks

Step 4: Reward yourself when you stick with it

Step 5: Make sure your surroundings set you up for success

Step 6: Keep visible track of your progress

Step 7: Find an outside source to hold you accountable

Step 8: Be open to adjustment if something isn’t working

Step 9: Always prioritize progress, not perfection

Make Your Time Tracking Data Feel Real

Somewhat paradoxically, it’s been found that when data is too easy to digest we tend to treat it the same way we would any passive piece of entertainment: Interesting, but ultimately unimpactful.

If you really want to achieve self-improvement by way of time tracking, letting what you learn flow in one ear and out the other simply won’t do.

So while it should be easy to track your time and generate reports from your time tracking software (both things 7pace delivers on), don’t take it easy on yourself when it comes to making it real. Study how you spend your time, manipulate the data in different ways to see various outcomes, and finally experiment with how you spend your time to see how your real life moves the needle and impacts all those charts and numbers.

How Will You Track Your Time on the Path to Improvement?

When removed from the controlling hands of overbearing managers and companies, tracking your time is a proven solution for improving yourself and optimizing your life (within reason).

All it takes is finding and actually making use of the right time tracking tool for your life and work style.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Ideal Days vs. Story Points: Which Is Better and Why?

Devs @ 7pace — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 09:02:53 +0000

Client, executives, and business owners always have one question at the start of a software project:

“When will it be done?”

If you’ve been working in software development for more than a month, you know this question is a trap.

Software development isn’t an assembly line where each task is measured down to the second. You’re creating a product that’s literally never existed before. There will always be uncertainty about the timeline.

Even so, software development is a business, so we have to accommodate the people we build software for.

They need the best estimate we can give them, and we need to avoid promising something we can’t deliver.

Which brings me to the focus of this article:

How can I create an estimated timeline that my stakeholders will accept—but won’t lead to unrealistic deadlines for me and my team?

Ideal Days vs. Story Points: Two Common Methods

In the quest to create better project estimates, developers have come up with all kinds of systems.

Two very common ones are:

Ideal days (or similar time-based estimates)
Story points

Both can be used to create project timelines, and both have their pros and cons.

One method is reliable, data-driven, and stable.

The other?

You can make it work. But it’s a bit more like crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

1. Ideal Days: Advantages and Disadvantages

Here’s a simple definition of for the ideal days method of estimating work:
Ideal days is an estimate of the number of days your team would take to complete a project if they worked on nothing else and had no interruptions.
In this context, “interruptions” means anything that causes the team to stop work on the project, including team meetings, training, other projects, illness, etc.

For example, a team of three developers might estimate a total of 45 ideal days to complete a project. If they had no interruptions and worked on nothing else, that would be an estimated timeline of 15 days.

No team exists without at least some interruptions.

For that reason, many teams might estimate somewhere between 20 and 30 days in this situation, depending on how optimistic (or realistic) they are.

Pros of Ideal Days

There are two main pros to the ideal days method:

It’s concrete and intuitive
Clients and outside stakeholders understand it immediately
When you tell a client, “this project should take 20 days,” you don’t have to educate them about the process you’re using or a new idea. They already understand the concept of time estimates expressed in hours, days, or months.

In most cases, clients and outside stakeholders will ask for an estimate given in days, weeks, or months—which is the main reason the ideal days method is so popular.

Cons of Ideal Days

There are three major problems with the ideal days method:

Human beings are scientifically proven to be outrageously bad at estimating how long things will take;
Ideal days are often calculated based on the ideal case scenario, not a data-backed review of actual work completed on similar projects;
In practice, software teams often miss their promise date when using the ideal days method.

This is not news to developers, of course. It’s no secret that we’re all bad at estimating time.

Despite these drawbacks, though, ideal days remain a popular method of estimating time. That brings us to the other most popular method: Story points.

2. Story Points: Advantages and Disadvantages

Here’s a definition of story points:
Story points are an estimate of the effort—not time—required to complete a task within a larger project.
As you probably know if you’re reading this article, the term “story points” comes from the idea of user stories, a key idea within Scrum and Agile project management methodologies.

If you’re creating a new report for small business owners, for example, your user story might say:

As a small business owner, I want a daily report of my revenue for the previous day.

Story points are the estimates of the effort it will take to build all the features needed to create the experience described in the user story.

Story Points Use a Relative Scale

Story points are often assigned using the Fibonacci numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.) or some other relative scale.

We may not know exactly how big a task is, but we know that changing a background from blue to green might be a 1 while building a new drop-down menu might be a 3 by comparison.

Importantly, you should never, ever mix story points with ideal days or any other time-based estimation method. That includes the common practice of pegging story points to a certain number of hours or days (e.g., “One story point = one day”).
Doing so strips your team of the most powerful reason to use story points—increasing your velocity.

Pros of Story Points

High-performance software teams don’t operate at one speed.

Instead, as they work their way through a project, they find ways to do it better, faster, and with less waste.

That means two vitally important things for your team:

After you’ve been through three sprints, you will have a very strong understanding of how fast the team is moving—its velocity;
The velocity will increase over time as the team finds new ways to complete the work faster and with less waste.
For example, it may take your team five days to complete the first 100 points of a project.

If so, your velocity over that first week is 100.

Story Points Example Estimate

Say you’re using one-week sprints for a 1,000 point project.

After three sprints, the team completes 104, 109, and 117 story points, respectively.

That’s an average velocity of 110, which is very strong evidence of the team’s capacity for this particular project even with normal interruptions. This is in stark contrast to the ideal days method, which assumes no interruptions and no other priorities.

You can now go to your stakeholders and confidently report that the 1,000 point project should be complete in a total of nine weeks.

If your team is increasing its velocity as it works (as it should!) there is a very good chance you’ll be able to deliver the project ahead of your promised delivery date.

The Cons of Story Points

While story points have many advantages, there are a few downsides, including:

Story points are abstract and difficult to understand;
You might not be able to make a good timeline estimate right at the outset of a new project;
You’ll have to work hard to educate clients about the method and communicate with them often about the team’s progress.
The abstract nature of story points means you’ll have to work much harder at communicating with clients, executives, and outside stakeholders.

At the beginning of the project, they’ll want you to tell them exactly how long the project will take—along with how much it will cost.

And in truth, you won’t really have an accurate estimate for them. It will be three sprints before you have an accurate velocity number you can use to make a data-backed projection.

For that reason, your initial estimates will be more uncertain than your estimates once you get the team moving.

That issue will be a point of concern for many clients, salespeople, or executives. They’ll want a firm timeline before they approve the project.

Luckily, there’s a straightforward way to create high-quality initial estimates even before you have a data-backed velocity number.

How to Create an Initial Delivery Estimate Using Story Points

The good news is: initial estimates using the story point method aren’t any less uncertain than the ideal days method.

If your team has completed similar projects to the one being proposed, review the completed sprint boards, then use the velocity the team achieved on those projects as a starting point for your estimate.

This lets you create realistic, data-backed estimates for the timeline of your project, ones that will get more accurate as you begin the project and start completing the work.

As a bonus, if you review the completed sprint boards of similar projects with your client or stakeholders as you give them your initial estimate, it will make you look like you really know what you’re doing.

Data-driven methods have that effect on people. 🙂

Story Points Create Better Outcomes

Despite its downsides, we believe story points create better outcomes for everyone involved in software development, including:

Fewer last-minute overtime or weekend work;
More on-time projects;
Happier clients;
Happier developers;
Less overtime and write-offs—which leads to more profitable projects.
Use Time Tracking with Story Points for Full Visibility Within Your Sprints
Story points are awesome for scoping and planning work, and velocity (once you have a real number based on at least iterations) is the most accurate way we know to calculate project timelines.

Together, story points and velocity are the antidote to fussy clients who want to know: “How long will this take!?”

Internally, however, once you’re inside a sprint, story points leave a gap in your visibility to the work being completed.

For example, imagine your team sets 20 points of work for a two-week sprint.

In Scrum, you never move a task to “complete” until it’s fully complete—ready for the user to use.

Five days into a ten-day sprint, you might still have 20 points remaining as “unfinished” on the sprint board.

You’re halfway through the sprint, but you have no information about how it’s going. You have 20 points of work remaining, but will it take five days to complete as you planned? Three days? 15 days?

At this point in the sprint, you have no data to make that projection.

It’s a bit like waking up in the morning, looking at your clock, but the only data you see is the year. It’s useful to know what year we’re in, but it doesn’t tell you if you’re running late for work.

Time Tracking Lets You Optimize the Work Within a Sprints
This is where time tracking comes in—not for public reports or timeline estimates to send to clients or outside stakeholders—but for internal tracking—so you know what’s happening during the sprint and can adjust accordingly.

For example, 7pace’s built-in time tracking application will show you exactly how long each team member has spent on each task in the sprint and how much more needs to be done.

This all happens without your team needing to do a lot of work to log every single task—it’s just built into the software.

That time tracking data lets you know if work is being done on the various tasks you’ve planned for the sprint.

If you’re five days into a sprint with 20 story points and work has only been done on four of those story points, you know you have a problem.

Time tracking lets you adjust and optimize work within the sprint—well before the last day or your retrospective.

That way there are no surprises.

How to Use Ideal Days (If You Must!)

Despite our love for data-driven methods, we know that some of you will choose ideal days or another time-based method.

You may be forced to, in fact—by your boss, by a client, or maybe even by your team.

We know one development lead who tried to get his team to move to story points, but they simply wouldn’t break the habit of associating story points to days.

If you must use ideal days, here’s what we recommend:

Calculate your ideal days estimate, then add two or three times as many days to that total.
This will give you a buffer of time to respond to interruptions, illnesses in the team, rework, and shifting priorities.

Then, keep track of how close you were on your estimate.

Say you estimated 100 ideal days for a five person team.

100 ideal days / 5 team members = 20 ideal days to completion
Then you delivered the project in eight weeks.

Actual delivery = 40 days
That’s a 4X factor, which you can use the next time you estimate a project timeline.

Ideal days x 4 = Realistic estimate for project completion
Beware putting too much trust in this method.

As we said earlier, it’s a bit like crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. Even when you use a data-backed estimate in this way, you’ll still have some projects that take far longer than you think.

But at least this gets you working with data—not just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Final Thoughts: Ideal Days vs. Story Points

In the end, the point of estimates is to avoid getting everyone in trouble when you miss your timeline.

Between the two methods, story points is the more accurate way to create timelines and track projects.

But you can make do with ideal days too—if you must.

Whatever you do, use as much data as you can when you make your estimate.

Guessing blind? That’s asking for trouble.

In the end, every software team wants to deliver high-quality products, on time, and on (or under!) budget.

As far as we know, there is no better method for estimating how long a project will take than the story points method.

You will need to be extra diligent about communicating with clients and stakeholders when using the story points method.

But when combined with time tracking for internal project tracking, story points will give you the best chance of getting great results, accurate estimates, happy clients, and a happier, higher-performing development team.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Why Developers Procrastinate (and How to Stop)

Devs @ 7pace — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 08:44:50 +0000

What should you be doing instead of reading this article?

Yeah, we know. You’re probably putting off some kind of work right now.

Procrastination is an age-old struggle — and not just for developers. But people who do knowledge work are especially prone to it, because of how mental blocks can severely impact their work.

So what causes those mental blocks? Why do we all procrastinate so much? And more importantly, how can we stop procrastinating and just get our work done?

Don’t worry — you still have a few minutes of reading ahead of you before you have to go back to whatever task you’re avoiding. Read on and learn all about what causes procrastination, how to finally beat it, and how developers can use time tracking to up their efficiency even more.

Why Do Developers Procrastinate?

Developers aren’t more likely to procrastinate than other people. And when we look at the root causes of procrastination for developers, they’re the same reasons as anyone else.

Contrary to what many believe, procrastination isn’t necessarily the result of a lack of self-discipline. There are a ton of reasons developers (or anyone else) might procrastinate. Let’s look at a few common ones below.

Perfectionism

In knowledge work in particular, many people strive to be perfect. That goes for developers, too — they often strive to write the “perfect” code.

In reality, code that does what it’s supposed to do without bugs is plenty good enough. Striving for perfection has a tendency to make developers put off their work, since they’re trying to achieve an impossible goal.

Fear of Success

It may seem counter-intuitive, but fear of success has held back many a knowledge worker. With success comes higher expectations and greater responsibility, and not everyone responds well to that kind of pressure. In this case, procrastination can be a self-sabotaging tool.

Lack of Planning

Have you ever shown up to work, sat down at your desk, booted up your computer, and then sat there for a while trying to figure out what to work on? That lack of planning can be a major procrastination driver.

Not Enough Work

This is another counter-intuitive sounding reason for procrastination, but it’s real! Some developers procrastinate because they don’t have enough work to do.

When your workdays aren’t filled, it’s easy to get in the habit of coasting — hanging out at your desk surfing social media or reading online articles like this one. And once you’re in the habit, it’s hard to break it even when there is work to do. Hence, procrastination.

Outdated Technologies

Software development is a field that requires its workers to stay pretty close to the cutting edge of new technologies. So trying to work with old ones that are outdated, obsolete, or deprecated can be a real challenge for devs, leading them to put off work.

Organizational Roadblocks

As much as developers like to put their heads down and get their work done without red tape or administrative hurdles getting in their way, that’s not how it works at every organization. If the company you work for places organizational roadblocks in your path, that may very well be a contributor to your procrastination habit.

Unnecessary or “Busy” Work

Feeling a sense of purpose and accomplishment is important for any worker, which is why it’s common for developers to procrastinate on work that doesn’t seem like it’s contributing to the greater good, like implementation of unnecessary features. The same goes for tedious or administrative tasks — those are easy to put off as well.

Work You Just Don’t Want to Do

And finally, there’s work you just don’t want to do. Maybe it’s outside of your wheelhouse. Maybe it feels unnecessary. Maybe it’s too hard, or you’re stuck at a particular blocker. But for all workers, including developers, just not wanting to do a certain task, project, or type of work can easily lead to procrastination.

How to Stop Procrastinating and Get Work Done

Identifying the cause of your procrastination can help you determine what you need to do to move past it. But even if you’re not sure why you procrastinate, these tips can help break that habit and get you to get your work done.

Take Baby Steps

When you’re putting off a task, the hardest part can be just getting started. So instead of looking at the big picture of all you need to do, just take a small step in the right direction — like telling yourself you only need to work on a task or project for 30 minutes before you take a break to reassess. It can turn an impossible-seeming project into something more doable, and once you get started, it’ll be easier to keep moving.

Make a Plan

Remember how lack of planning is a common driver for procrastination? Combat that by going into every workday with a plan. Make it a habit before you leave each night to think about what you need to accomplish the following day, and make yourself a to-do list or a schedule — whatever works to keep you on track.

Remove Distractions

Have you considered you might procrastinate simply because you’re too distracted to work effectively? Do what you can to cut down on things that might pull you away from your work. For example, you could find a quiet room to work in, or wear noise-canceling headphones. Block social media and other distracting websites from your work computer.

Isolate Yourself

If you work in an office with others, another cause for your procrastination might be that people need you for things. And while it’s great to be the go-to person in the office, it’s not ideal for productivity.

If you struggle with being pulled away from work by your coworkers, isolate yourself away from others so you appear less available. If you’re not able to go work somewhere without others around, stick a sign to the back of your chair to let people know you’re in deep work mode and don’t want to be interrupted.

Use a Technique Like Pomodoro

The Pomodoro technique has become a common way for all kinds of people to beat their procrastination habits. It works by requiring you to deeply focus on work for a period of time (usually 25 minutes), and then take a short, mandated break (5 minutes or so). You repeat this cycle over and over throughout the workday, alternating focused work with short breaks.

Take Breaks

On that note, another possible reason for your procrastination is that you feel tired or worn out — and that can be more easily remedied than you might think. Many of us don’t take enough breaks at work, even though science shows that breaks are necessary and can greatly improve productivity and quality of work. If you’re feeling stuck on a task or project, take a short break and come back to it later.

Switch Between Tasks

The same goes for working on the same task for too long. It’s easy to get stuck when you have tunnel vision. So if you feel like you can’t move forward on a particular task, switch to something else for a while. You can always come back to the first task with fresh eyes later, without having wasted any time in the meantime.

Want to Become Even More Efficient? Track Time with 7pace Timetracker

Once you’ve beaten procrastination, you might be looking for ways to become even more productive at work.

The most productive teams are autonomous ones. And a major part of autonomy is a time tracking solution that isn’t made to help managers watch over your shoulder — but to integrate seamlessly with your work and provide you with data and insights that help you work smarter.

7pace Timetracker is the only time tracking solution designed to measure and track progress completely in the background, so you don’t have to waste one second of effort. And it provides valuable data about your time at work that can help you plan, execute, and measure every aspect of every project.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

These Are the 21 Best Developer Productivity Tools

Devs @ 7pace — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 08:41:14 +0000

If work in the 21st century has a theme, it’s this: Productivity.

We’re all striving to be more productive — at work, at home, and everywhere in between. And to help us achieve ultimate productivity, there are countless tools and resources that promise to make you able to work harder, better, faster, and stronger.

But not all productivity tools were created equal. Some are just better than others, and some are better suited to different tasks and workflows. That’s where this guide comes in.

If you’re a developer standing in front of the veritable sea of productivity apps and tools available and wondering where to start, don’t worry. We’ve got you. We’ve narrowed down the 21 best developer productivity tools, focusing on resources that will help you stave off distractions, find your flow, and work collaboratively across your team.

The 21 Developer Productivity Tools You Need to Download Right Now

Before we dive in, let’s cover the bad news: You’re never going to become 100 percent productive. Sorry, but that’s just not how human brains work.

The first step is to approach this list with the right motives. If you’re looking to work better with your teammates or break bad work habits (like checking social media every few minutes), these tools can help. If your goal is to deep work for 14 hours a day, you need to accept that that’s just unrealistic.

Don’t think of productivity as an end goal or something you will eventually achieve. Think of it as a journey you take every time you sit down to work. And use these tools to help guide you on that daily journey.

Developer Productivity Tools for Project Management, Teamwork, and Workflow

HeySpace is a task management software that also has a chat feature — sort of like a combination of Slack and Trello. Its innovative and user-friendly design allows you to see tasks and communications in just one screen. That means no more toggling between different screens (or different apps) to chat with your team about a project or task. HeySpace offers both free and paid premium plans, depending on the number of users on your team.

Codestream is for developers who are tired of the effort and frustration that come with code reviews. This tool lets you skip the pull request by simply highlighting a code block and adding a note. This means discussing code with your team simply and directly in the coding environment. Codestream offers support for every programming language and makes group problem solving a simple part of any team’s workflow.

MantisBT is the bug tracker of your dreams. Just like its namesake, the Mantis, this tool leaves no stone unturned in its search for bugs in your code. A web-based bug tracking program, MantisBT tracks your code for errors, and then sends an email notification to you and everyone on your team whenever it finds a problem. Don’t worry — you can customize notifications if an email for every bug isn’t your thing.

Codeanywhere is a game-changing tool for teams of developers who need to work together on one code block at the same time. Think of it like Google Docs for code. It’s a code editor that supports more than 70 different programming languages, and allows all users to see who’s working on what in real time. All you have to do to get started is send a link to your code editor to anyone who’s on your team.

AnyDesk is for anyone who has a killer desktop setup at work, and a similarly killer desktop setup at home, and wants to be able to work on both of them. Setting up the perfect virtual environment is a pain — and can take literal hours. So instead of doing it for every computer you use to code, just do it once and then use AnyDesk to connect to your work PC from any computer anywhere.

Tupleis for developers who have realized that, as much as they’ve become standard for workers in 2020, Slack and Zoom weren’t made for programmers — and it shows. A trio of software engineers created Tuple to make pair programming easier for remote teams, and the result is an app with simple, high-quality screen sharing, crisp audio, and efficient CPU usage so it has full functionality even on a low-latency connection.

Todolist is the only to-do list app that’s made just for developers. With just how many list apps exist, you’re probably wondering what makes this one good enough to make our list, so here it is: Todolist allows you to do all the same productivity tasks you’d do with any list app — prioritize tasks, filter and group them, and archive them — but from a code-like environment. You manage everything with simple commands that make it easy to check things off your list and queue up a new project, without breaking your flow.

Figma is a must-have tool for developers who work with designers, product managers, or product teams. It’s a browser-based tool that gives designers one, single link where they can access crucial information and assets like colors, widths, and heights for design elements.

Developer Productivity Tools for Breaking Bad Habits (and Forming Good Ones)

Habitica makes it fun to create good habits at work. Using pixel-like design, Habitica turns you into a hero in an in-platform world where you’re tasked with fighting through daily, weekly, and long-term goals. For completing tasks and building up good habits, you earn points, discover new animals, and build your strength. For failing at tasks, you lose strength — and your character can die. For developers who love gaming, this is an entertaining (and effective) way to build better work habits.

F.lux is the productivity tool that will save you from dry, tired eyes — a problem for developers everywhere. This tool automatically adjusts your screen color based on your time and location, making colors warmer as it gets dark where you are to make your screen more natural for your eyes in the dark. You can also override the automatic color-changes and set your own schedule, which is a great way to remind yourself to take breaks from the harsh light of your computer screen.

Developer Productivity Tools for Banishing Distractions

Sublime Text is designed to be a code editor with an easy-to-use interface and eye-friendly work environment. It allows you to markup and program in a variety of coding languages, while also easily moving across files, switching between projects, and changing specific lines of code. But one of the features we love most about Sublime Text is its built-in distraction mode, which is sort of like a do-not-disturb setting for when you want to deep work.

Pi-Hole is for those developers who think there’s nothing more distracting than a webpage ad. Think about it: They clutter up your screen. They reduce network performance. By all accounts, they’re an unnecessary obstacle in the way of productive work. Enter Pi-Hole, an ad-blocker that connects to your router instead of your browser, making it able to provide network-wide ad blocking. Pairing Pi-Hole with a VPN protects every device on your network from ads that distract away from work.

Cold Turkey requires you to know exactly what your vices are. But then it does a really great job at blocking you from accessing them. Set it up to limit access to certain websites, certain apps, and even your internet access. The result? A work environment that’s free of all distractions for as long as you need it to be, allowing you to work without the usual interruptions.

Developer Productivity Tools for Getting Into Your Flow

Strict Workflow embraces the research-backed success of the Pomodoro method — the idea that for maximum productivity, you should alternate 25-minute focused sprints with 5-minute breaks. Using the Pomodoro method used to require a timer, but not anymore. Strict Workflow is a Chrome extension that acts as a built-in timer for that uber-effective work-and-break cycle. It runs in the background and lets you know when it’s time to work, and when it’s time to take a breather. No egg timer required.

Developer Productivity Tools for Getting Into Your Flow

Dewo is the tool developers need to combat one of their biggest disruptors: Context switching. Dewo bills itself as users’ “personal assistant for deep work,” and that’s pretty much what it does. The app uses AI to analyze your productivity patterns, and then provides you with insights that should help you figure out how to work not harder, but smarter. Dewo can also toggle a do-not-disturb mode that silences other apps and sets your Slack status to “Away” once you enter a flow state, ensuring that nothing gets in the way of that sweet, sweet deep work.

The Silver Searcher is another app for developers that’s meant to minimize wasted time at work — by making it easier to search your code. Think about it: If you’re like a lot of devs, you probably spend a fair amount of your “coding time” actually reading and scanning code, not writing it. The Silver Searcher helps combat that by making it much easier — and much, much faster — to search through code.

Walrus.ai is yet another app that’s here to save money and effort for teams of developers, this time by automating QA testing. It makes testing more efficient and lightweight by providing full end-to-end testing via a single API call, as opposed to cumbersome in-house automated testing or manual QA. And if you’re concerned about accuracy, Walrus employs a whole team to monitor every run and keep a look out for false positives and negatives.

Programmer’s Music is the perfect app for the developer that wants the perfect soundtrack for productive work, but doesn’t want to put in the time or effort to curate a playlist his or herself. There are plenty of sites out there that offer curated music lists to promote focus and productivity, but this one is our favorite because of its non-vocal, distraction free songs that can be timed to the Pomodoro method if you want them to be.

Developer Productivity Tools for Tracking Time (Hint: You Only Need One)

7pace Timetracker is the only time tracking tool developers need. Time trackers are not inherently tools for productivity, because measuring actual productivity requires knowing more than how many minutes or hours you spent at your computer. 7pace Timetracker allows you to track other valuable metrics in addition to your time worked, and you can turn those metrics into insights that can help you improve your pace and efficiency.

Ready to see why developers love 7pace Timetracker? Try it for yourself today.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Should Time Tracking Be Optional for Development Teams?

Devs @ 7pace — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 23:33:40 +0000

It’s a question that has plagued the development community for about as long as software teams have existed: Should time tracking be optional for developers?

It’s no secret that many developers don’t love having to track their time. When it comes to knowledge work like software development, time tracking isn’t an accurate measure of productivity or work quality, so what’s the point?

Even within the development community, there are many differing opinions on this. So we looked at some of the most common arguments against time tracking for developers, and then talked to some experts. They have a unique perspective to add: That time tracking can be used to benefit the developers themselves in unexpected ways.

Why Do So Many Developers Hate Time Tracking?

Well, there are a lot of reasons. Here are a few of the most common reasons developers point to when they’re making a case against time tracking in their field.

Time Tracking Feels Like a Waste of Time

Sure, there are usually things about our jobs that can feel tedious and unnecessary. But for developers, time tracking can feel especially like a waste of time — and extra chore that’s often overlooked and done in hindsight.

Research shows that workers who record their time days (or even weeks) after they do the work tend to make wildly inaccurate estimates of how long they actually worked, which adds to the feeling that time tracking is just a tool for managers to control their teams, and not anything that’s really necessary for the work that team is doing.

A Lot of Developers Don’t Have Good Tools for Time Tracking

The previous problem and this one go hand-in-hand — one of the reasons time tracking can feel like such a chore is because many software teams don’t have a good system or the right tool for time tracking. We’ve actually solved this, but that doesn’t mean all development teams are using the right tools — many still use intrusive, outdated tracking methods, from software that gets in the way of work, to really old fashioned methods like tracking on scraps of paper.

Developers should know better than anyone that doing a job without the right tools makes that job a serious chore, so this is a big problem that turns many a dev against the idea of time tracking altogether.

Time Tracking Doesn’t Fit Naturally Into the Way Developers Work

And finally, there are all the myriad ways that time tracking just doesn’t really make sense for the type of work that developers do.

For one, developers are kind of known for their tendency to work strange hours and in irregular cycles of productivity. Software development is not a nine-to-five, and that can complicate the time tracking process.

Then you have to factor in how different types of coding can take different amounts of time. In a company culture that uses time tracking to judge a developer’s productivity, this can make it feel like a waste of company time to get stuck on a tricky problem or mired in some complex code, and those are things developers can’t really avoid.

That brings us very nicely to the final (and we think, biggest) problem with time tracking for developers: It creates the impression that only focused work time counts as work.
Software development is knowledge work, which means it requires a great deal of mental energy to complete. Coding isn’t like an assembly line, where a worker can show up, clock in, do the work, and clock out. Often, even when we aren’t actually sitting at our desks in front of our work, knowledge workers are still thinking over tricky problems they have to tackle, blurring the lines between work time and time off. How do you track that with traditional time tracking methods?

Should Time Tracking Be Optional? 2 Developers Weigh In

Considering all those arguments against it, it’s no wonder a lot of developers are against time tracking, in the traditional sense. But does the practice have any hidden benefits?
To answer that question, we turned to a couple of experts: Maxim Lutsan, our CTO at 7pace, and Sascha Zierfuss, one of our product managers.

Both Maxim and Sascha agree that forcing developers to track their time just for the sake of time tracking can backfire.

“Forcing people to do something usually doesn’t yield the best results, imposing its use without explanation will seem like a form of control to the devs and that’s not the goal,” Sascha explained.

But he added that this doesn’t mean developers shouldn’t track their time at all. In fact, what they really need to do is reframe their thinking around time tracking so they can use it as a tool to make themselves and their work better.

“Time tracking is a powerful tool to help with getting better at estimating work or seeing the progression of your skills, but it requires accurate data to be the most effective and that comes with using the tool seriously and not just ‘filling it out because my manager asked me to,’” he said. “Some devs just have a knack for estimating work and in those cases time tracking might appear as useless additional overhead, but for others it can help them improve and for both it allows them to track their progress and improvement over time.”

Maxim compares time tracking to something like the screen time report that’s built into a lot of mobile phone operating systems.

“This is a report based on user’s tracking where everyone can get insights and decide if he spends too much time with his smartphone,” Maxim said. Similarly, time tracking can give software teams insights about how they spend their time at work, and that’s where the real value lies, he said.

How Time Tracking Can Help Developers Improve Their Work (And Themselves)

According to Sascha, those insights can be the key to doing better work — and becoming a better developer overall.

“Time tracking allows you to correlate effort estimates (typically story points) with the actual execution,” he said. “Being able to look back at tasks and projects to see how long they took to accomplish allows devs to become better at estimating how long a new, but similar, task or project will take. Nobody likes crunch time, so the more accurate the estimates, the less stressful the project is.”

But in addition to that, time tracking can help developers tangibly see their own improvement over time.

“Time tracking also allows you to see how you improve over time when learning new skills. For instance, when you start on a new language or technology it can be very motivating to see that a task that originally took you 8 hours, then took you 6 and now takes you 4 hours to complete because you’ve gotten more knowledgeable and experienced.”

The Downsides to Time Tracking Are Real

Still, all the reasons developers resist traditional time tracing methods and requirements are real, and they deserve attention, Sascha said.

“The major negative is that time tracking is often seen as a way to control what people are doing. Unfortunately, some companies only use time tracking to ‘keep tabs’ on their employees. It is true that this is often merely the perception of those required to track and that’s why outlining the goals and advantages of time tracking becomes important,” he explained. “Another negative comes with some of the tools used for tracking; entering time can be a very tedious process and nobody wants to spend 30 minutes filling out their time for a day/week. If you need an entry in your time card for ‘entering time’ then you have a problem, not all tools are created equal in this regard so you definitely want to shop around and find something that fits your team’s workflow with minimal overhead.”

Time Tracking: Optional or Required?

So what’s the bottom line? Where exactly do these two experts fall when it comes to making time tracking optional for development teams?

For both Maxim and Sascha, the downsides of time tracking for developers are major and deserve consideration. However, both of these experts agree: The downsides are outweighed by what teams can gain from tracking their time.

“By the end of the day I believe all teams track time somehow. It can be precise with time tracking or it will be rough with calculating a team’s Velocity for example,” Maxim said.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Lead time vs Cycle time vs Takt time: A Comprehensive Guide to Work & Time

Devs @ 7pace — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 23:17:20 +0000

Developers and software teams already know that one of the biggest challenges of their job is accurately scoping work, and being able to consistently and predictably deliver results to clients within the promised timeline.

Yet another challenge is finding ways to streamline workflows so missed deadlines due to inaccurate scoping become 100 percent a thing of the past. Lead time, cycle time, and takt time are just a few metrics that software teams can track and optimize to boost their efficiency and productivity — but these are also metrics that are often confused with one another.

Each one of them — lead time, cycle time, and takt time — is an individual metric that helps developers monitor, track, and evaluate how efficiently your team completes projects. Optimizing each of them for better efficiency doesn’t only boost client satisfaction; it also makes your team better, faster, and stronger.

But doing that requires understanding what each metric is, how to calculate it, and the role it plays in the overall project scope. By understanding the differences between lead time, cycle time, and takt time — and how and when to use each metric — developers can discover paths to better scoping and increased productivity.

Lead Time vs Cycle Time vs Takt Time: What Are They

Lead time, cycle time, and takt time all come from Kanban, a workflow management method that was originally created to help streamline manufacturing processes. Many of the principles of Kanban translate well to the process of software development, so it’s become a common practice for managing workflows for software teams, as well.

Lead time, cycle time, and takt time are all metrics used to track, measure, and evaluate efficiency at different parts of the production process. If that doesn’t make sense just yet, don’t worry — we’ll explain each one in better detail down below.

What Is Lead Time?

Lead time is the total amount of time between when a new task or project enters your workflow, and when it leaves your workflow. In other words, it’s the total time from when your team agrees to take on a project, to when you deliver it to the client.

How Is Lead Time Calculated?

The formula for lead time in a manufacturing setting is:

In the context of a software team, that might look like this:

After the client makes a request that includes three deliverables, it takes your team two days to process it.
Then, it takes four months (~120 days) to complete the project.
Once the project is finished on your end, the client takes two weeks (14 days) to review it and make the final payment.
In this case, the lead time would equal 2 days + 120 days + 14 days, or 136 days.

Why Is Lead Time Important for Software Teams?

Lead time provides you with a good overview of how long a project takes from start to finish. You can compare your lead time to your cycle time to determine some insights about your team’s productivity and customer satisfaction, but more on that in a minute.

What Is Cycle Time?

Cycle time is how you can measure how long it takes your team to complete work on a project. In manufacturing, cycle time means the amount of time it takes to complete a production cycle from beginning to end. For software teams, that usually translates to the amount of time from when your team starts coding, to when the software is released.

Cycle time differs from lead time in that it measures only the time your team spends in production. Lead time takes that measurement, then combines it with the time it takes your team to receive and process requests, deliver them to the client, and receive approval and payment.

How Is Cycle Time Calculated?

The formula for calculating cycle time is:

Let’s take the same example from above, and calculate the team’s cycle time.

It took the team 120 hours to complete the three deliverables the client requested. So cycle time could be calculated in two different ways.

120 hours divided by three deliverables = 40 hours of cycle time per deliverable; or
120 hours divided by one project for the client = 120 hours of cycle time

Why Is Cycle Time Important for Software teams?

Cycle time is one of the most important metrics you can compare to your lead time, and how those two differ can tell you quite a bit about your team’s efficiency.

For example, if your cycle time is much lower than your lead time, it shows that your team is either taking a long time to process requests and begin projects, or projects are lingering in the approval phase. This could mean your team is leaving loose ends and not moving through the entire workflow efficiently.

On the other hand, if your cycle time is equal to your lead time, it could be because you’re allowing processing and approval times on projects to overlap. While this might be an efficient use of your software team’s time, it may also lower the quality of the customer service you deliver.

What Is Takt Time?

And now, let’s look at time measurements from a different angle with takt time. Takt time is a measurement of how quickly or efficiently your team is able to meet the needs of your client or production schedule. “Takt” comes from the German word for “pulse,” and that’s a good way of looking at it — this measurement finds your team’s ideal “pulse” of work, that allows you to deliver projects as needed without underworking or overworking the team.

How Is Takt Time Calculated?

The formula for calculating takt time is:

This can be a little trickier to apply to work like software development (though that doesn’t make it a less useful metric!).

In the example we’ve been using above, we can take those three deliverables the client needs, and divide them into the 120 hours your team has available for the project. In that case:

Takt time = 120 / 3 = 40 hours per deliverable.

But we know software development isn’t always that easy to segment. So, to look at this another way, let’s say your team has scoped the client’s project and determined there are 6 smaller goals you need to achieve during your sprints. So in this case:

Takt time = 120 / 6 = 20 hours per sprint. That means your team can plan on completing two sprints per week to hit their optimal pulse, or takt, for this project.

Why Is Takt Time Important for Software Teams?

Takt time tells you whether your team is overworked and unable to keep up with demand, or underworked and not being as productive as it could be.

For example, if you calculate your takt time to be 120 hours per project, but your team’s cycle time is 150 hours, your team won’t be able to deliver on the deadlines it’s scoping.

On the other hand, if your takt time is 120 hours and your cycle time is 100 hours, you’re leaving 20 hours per project in your scope as wasted time.

How Can You Measure Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Takt Time?

We know time tracking isn’t a favorite topic among developers. But for getting the valuable insights that lead time, cycle time, and takt time can provide, it’s 100 percent necessary.

So why not use a time tracking tool that’s built into your existing systems, but stays in the background, out of your way while you do the job you’re here to do? 7pace Timetracker is just that — it’s a time tracking tool built for developers, by developers who use it themselves. It integrates directly into Azure DevOps, Azure Boards, and GitHub, so no matter where and how you work, it’s always where you need it to be — tracking time so you don’t have to worry about it.

But we know we’re not going to sell you on a time tracking tool unless there’s real value your team can gain. That’s why it’s not so important how you track different time metrics — what matters is why you track them (and how you use the insights they give you).

Why Should You Track All These Time Metrics?

Tracking time metrics like lead time, cycle time, and takt time comes with a whole pile of potential benefits for your team. These metrics can:

Help your team identify bottlenecks in your workflow;
Give you a better understanding of your team’s capacity for work;
Help you more accurately scope new projects.

The most important takeaway here is that tracking different time metrics gives you a complete view of how your team is spending time. That allows you to identify any workflow problems, and identifying them is the first step toward eliminating them — and getting as close as possible to maximum productivity with your team.

It is important to note and recognize that time metrics will be constantly changing, so this isn’t a one-and-done kind of assessment. In order to keep getting the maximum value out of tracking time metrics, you’ll have to continue to track and analyze them over time, on all your projects — and adjust your workflow accordingly. Sometimes changes you put into place based on one set of time metrics will end up getting reversed later based on a newer set of time metrics — software teams are made up of people, after all, and not robots.

It takes some time and effort to constantly track time metrics, but we think the value of the insights you can gather makes the endeavor well worth it. If you’re ready to start tracking your team’s time metrics — from lead time to cycle time to takt time and even more — you need the time tracker that will automate the most tedious parts of the process.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Managing Up: How Developers Can Better Communicate to Management

Devs @ 7pace — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 23:08:33 +0000

Everyone’s had a bad boss.

And then there are the bosses that aren’t necessarily bad, but who are overworked, overextended, disorganized, or just straight up disengaged with their work. Those bosses are a dime a dozen.

Dealing with bad bosses is something that we all have to learn, regardless of the industry we work in. The same goes for dealing with mediocre bosses, and even dealing with good bosses who, for whatever reason, aren’t doing the best job at being bosses. One secret? It’s something called “managing up,” and it’s gotten a lot of attention in business circles in recent years.

Managing up isn’t just for the corporate world, though. Developers can make use of this tactic to better deal with their managers, too. Read on to learn all you need to know.

What Is Managing Up?

A lot of different experts and publications define managing up in different ways. But at the core of what they all say it means, managing up is doing everything you can to make your boss’s job easier — basically, it’s managing your manager.

The Harvard Business Review has written a lot about managing up in recent years, and says that doing so effectively takes a combination of these five steps:

Why Would Anyone Want To Manage Up?

We know how this sounds: Like it’s a lot of work. In fact, one of the most prominent criticisms of managing up is that it asks lower level employees to essentially do their boss’s job — without getting their boss’s pay.

But managing up gives workers more control over their work environment and conditions. It allows them an active voice in setting expectations at work, and establishing norms for the workplace. For developers specifically, managing up can be an effective way to protect your autonomy at work, and minimize conflict with your boss, other members of your team, and anyone else at work.

And while managing up is a great tool for dealing with a less-than-stellar boss, these tactics offer other benefits, too. Regardless of the quality of your boss, managing up establishes you to be capable, efficient, and a self-starter — someone who can be trusted to manage their work without any hand-holding or micro-managing, and someone who will likely be able to rise in the ranks of their organization quickly.

How Can Developers Manage Up?

Managing up is a little bit different for software developers.

Why? Modern software teams have to work together in a fast-paced, highly collaborative, experimental, and iterative environment. In order for teams to succeed across the organization, everyone involved in any given software project needs to be good at communication, collaboration, coordination, planning, and prioritization.

In other words? Everyone — not just managers — needs to have “management skills.”

That means that members of software teams aren’t as able to just show up and do their jobs as workers in some other industries. Because developers are required to have these skills, it’s common for more of the management load to shift as everyone on the team becomes deputized to help out — particularly in cases where managers are overworked or overextended.

But that doesn’t preclude developers from consciously managing up to make their own lives easier, or to advance their careers. Here’s how to get started, one step at a time.

Your First Managing Up Experiment: Step By Step

For a developer who hasn’t tried managing up before, it can be intimidating to figure out how to get started. Here are some easy steps to follow to get the hang of managing up. Once you’ve gone through these steps a few times, you should be able to manage your manager effectively on the day-to-day, and on large projects.

Best Practices for Managing Up

Like any other skill, though, managing up is easier said than done. These are some of the best practices that will help you succeed at managing your manager.

Dos and Don’ts

Let’s start with the things you should and should not do when managing up.

Do:

Be curious. Get to know your role, your boss, and your boss’s role. Ask a lot of questions. Show an interest in everything about your work and your company.
Anticipate needs. As you get to know your boss and their job better, you might be able to deliver on what they need before they even ask you for it.
Jump in. Always be willing to help out wherever and whenever you can.
Think about the big picture. Try to see beyond your role, and what the goals and direction are for your entire organization. Then, align your own goals and priorities with the bigger picture.

Don’t:

Manipulate. There’s a very big difference between managing up and sucking up, brown-nosing, or being a yes man. You want to be seen as positive, helpful, and self-starting, not as someone who sucks up to their boss to win favor.
Get involved in politics. Just about any time a group of people works together, there’s bound to be office politics. Avoid getting involved in them by not talking about other people, but instead focusing on doing your job well and delivering quality and results.
Cover up your mistakes. As you take on new projects and strive to lead and work autonomously, you’re bound to make mistakes. Own up to them when they happen, and be reflective about how you can learn from them to get better and avoid making similar mistakes in the future. That’s the mark of a real leader.

Getting Better At Managing Up

Like any workplace skill, getting better at managing up takes work and practice. Here are some ways to continue to improve at managing your manager.

Come With Solutions, Not Just Problems

When you run into problems at work, yes you should present those to your boss. But when you come to your manager with a problem, try to also bring a potential solution or two. It shows initiative and mastery.

Take Small Things Off Your Boss’s Plate

Managing up doesn’t have to be all about big, grand projects that propel your entire organization forward. It can be as simple as looking for small things you can volunteer to handle for your boss so they’re off their plate. Look for tasks like scheduling meetings, booking meeting rooms, doing basic research, and other administrative tasks that can save a lot of time for your boss.

Adjust Your Work Style to Fit Your Boss’s Needs

One of the best tips for successfully managing up is to adjust your work and communication styles to fit what your boss prefers. For example, if they prefer emails over face-to-face meetings, try to shoot off messages to them throughout the day rather than stopping by their office with questions and updates.

Lead New Changes That Meet Big Picture Goals

Look for ways to change your workplace processes or innovate, and when you present those to your boss, volunteer to lead the work that it will take to implement those changes. This shows a few things: That you’re aware of and thinking about the big-picture goals of your organization, and that you’re willing to put in the work it takes to move toward those goals.

Learning how to manage up will take time and work — this is definitely a long-term strategy for gaining autonomy and control over your work environment.

But that work will pay off when you’re a trusted part of your organization, known for being able to tackle any problem without being micromanaged. Give your boss better things to do than breathe down your neck — start managing up today.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Automation Tools for DevOps: Every Tool You Need in 2021

Devs @ 7pace — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 15:55:36 +0000

Automation is not a new concept, but it’s certainly becoming more common in more and more areas of our lives.

Nowhere is that more apparent than on software teams, where automation has become a central principal to how DevOps works.

From continuous integration to continuous testing to continuous deployment, the entire DevOps pipeline is meant to be automated. This makes this style of software development fast, efficient, consistent, and reliable, while simultaneously making it able to make more deliveries.

Does this signal a newly beginning “automation era” for DevOps teams? We think so. Automation will be a crucial tool for teams who want to stay competitive in 2021. For that, developers need to understand the role that automation plays in DevOps, and know the best and newest tools for automating more and more tasks.

Why Use Automation Tools for DevOps?

Like we’ve already said, automation is baked into the very heart of the DevOps process.

But DevOps teams should be trying to automate more and more processes and tasks — as many and as often as they can. Why? Basically, if a tool can do a task instead of a developer having to do it manually, then why wouldn’t you want that? This is doubly true if that task is rote or repetitive and doesn’t require any human touch, but still needs to be done as part of the process.

There are a number of reasons for this.

For one, automating menial tasks in particular frees up developers to do more important, innovative work.

Another reason is that manually completing tasks opens your team up to errors. While humans bring knowledge and ability that’s still far greater than what machines can accomplish, it’s official — the machines are better than us at performing simple tasks perfectly, every time.

Not all tasks can be automated — at least, not now, with current technology. But to streamline your DevOps processes in 2021 and beyond — to free up the talented members of your team to do work that’s never rote, and to eliminate errors that come from manual tasks — consider these, some of the best automation tools for DevOps that are available right now.

Top 10 Automation Tools for DevOps in 2021

If your team is looking for new ways to automate work this year, these tools are the best place to start.

1. Snort

What It Does: Snort is a super popular, open-source DevOps security tool. It can help your software team detect intruders so you can protect your system as quickly as possible from further attack.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: Snort can automatically analyze packet logging and traffic in real time. It’s designed to highlight malicious attacks against the system by automating the process of analyzing protocol, searching and matching contents, detecting buffer overflows, CGI attacks, OS fingerprinting attempts, and more.

2. OverOps

What It Does: OverOps is a continuous reliability system with a number of tools that will help your team quickly identify and fix the root causes for errors, server crashes, and other problems.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: All the time your team spends filtering through logs to identify and fix code breaks? OverOps will do that for you. It continuously detects and prioritizes critical software issues and delivers the complete source code needed to fix errors. It also blocks the release and deployment of unreliable releases, preventing errors and crashes in the future.

3. Docker

What It Does: Docker is already popular and well-known in the DevOps world, but not all teams use it to its full potential, especially when it comes to its automation capabilities. Docker provides containerization of apps and images, making them more portable and secure. Any team can use Docker — it’s open source and platform independent.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: Docker can facilitate automatic deployment for apps, which ultimately leads to faster deployment and making distributed development possible.

4. Kubernetes

What It Does: Kubernetes is Google’s container orchestration platform, which is great for taking your containerization a step further if you already use Docker. With Kubernete, you can group your containers into clusters, which can aid with deployment (automized, if you use Kubernetes).

How It Helps Automate DevOps: Kubernetes is designed to help automate the process of managing containers. It takes over the task of distributing and scheduling containers across your clusters, which provides your team with the ability to scale much more rapidly than if they were handling these processes manually.

5. Jenkins

What It Does: Simply put, Jenkins is the automation tool for taking over repetitive tasks from members of your team. Jenkins is a not-so-secret weapon that software teams are using to free up their talent from performing repetitive tasks so they can focus on creating and innovating.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: There isn’t much that Jenkins doesn’t automate. It comes with thousands of available plugins for CI/CD automation, allowing you to automate virtually any stage of your delivery pipeline.

6. Bamboo

What It Does: Bamboo is another CI/CD automation tool for DevOps teams. Bamboo is similar to Jenkins, with the main difference being that it comes with a number of pre-built features that require configured plugins with Jenkins. It’s less customizable, but for teams with more common, basic needs, it can save significant configuration time.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: Like Jenkins, Bamboo is a CI/CD tool that helps teams automate their entire delivery pipeline, from builds to deployment.

7. Raygun

What It Does: Raygun is a popular tool for outstanding application performance monitoring (APM). It’s particularly great for error monitoring and crash reporting, which lets your team know about performance issues as soon as they happen.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: If there’s any error in your code, Raygun will find it for you. But that’s not all it does. It will also automatically link errors back to the exact line of source code, function, or API call that caused them. Additionally, it will automatically identify the highest priority problems and notify your DevOps team accordingly.

8. Gradle

What It Does: Gradle is a versatile and popular build tool for DevOps, which was designated by Google to be the official build tool for Android Studio. It supports a number of popular programming languages, and offers incremental builds, which can save developers significant compile time.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: Gradle is similar to a number of other popular automated build tools. What sets it apart is that it uses a Groovy-based DSL to describe build scripts, compared to the XML configuration that most other apps use. Plus, there’s Gradle’s build cache, which reuses task outputs and retains a memory of build information, saving considerable time down the road.

9. Ansible

What It Does: Ansible is a configuration management tool that’s agent-less and easy to deploy. Because it’s agent-less, it’s faster, safer, and more lightweight than many similar tools that are available to do the same kinds of jobs.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: Ansible automates a number of repetitive tasks, including application deployment, cloud provisioning, intra-service orchestration, and more. It also uses YAML to describe automation jobs in “playbooks,” which can be reused and replicated to save even more time on similar tasks later.

10. Buddy

What It Does: Buddy is another CI/CD tool. What makes Buddy stand out from other tools is how easily it integrates with things like Google, Azure, AWS, and more.

How It Helps Automate DevOps: Buddy might have the most flexible automation pipelines of any tool on this list, which means it’s a fast and straightforward way to automate building, testing, and deploying software. It will also automatically monitor status, health, and performance of all your applications.

7pace Timetracker: Automated Time Tracking that Stays Out of Your Way

One of the most powerful ways automation can help developers do their best work is by removing tedious, unwanted tasks from their plate.

One of those tasks is time tracking — something developers notoriously hate to do.
While keeping track of time is a pain, it has to be done. Time tracking is how you collect the historical data about your work that helps you calculate your pace and make delivery estimates for new projects and clients. It’s also how you learn about yourself and your habits, and keep improving as a developer.

So what developers need is a tool that will all but automate the time tracking process, tracking time while staying in the background and out of the way. That tool is 7pace Timetracker.

7pace Timetracker integrates directly into Azure DevOps, Azure Boards and Github. It tracks your time, delivers insights about your work, generates invoices, automates burndown and completed work, and more. In other words, if you’re serious about adding automation tools for DevOps this year, you should start with 7pace Timetracker.

7pace Timetracker is the only integrated, professional time management solution for teams using Azure DevOps and GitHub.