DEV Community: BlueOptima

Talent Retention: How To Retain Your Organisation’s Top Software Developers

BlueOptima — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:48:47 +0000

The software development landscape is changing rapidly, and the demand for software developers is growing. Recruiting high-quality talent and helping engineering teams to remain adaptive to new technologies are significant challenges for CTOs.

The technology industry has the highest turnover rate for any industry. A LinkedIn survey of industry professionals reported that tech companies have on average an employee churn rate of 13.2%, which can be as high as 21.7% for embedded software engineers. The technology industry is known to be highly competitive, and unsurprisingly software developers are choosing to search for better opportunities frequently.

However, there are significant factors that contribute to the low talent retention rate across the industry.

This article will discuss the leading factors behind the industry’s low employee retention rates. It will aim to understand how to improve talent retention within organisations; it includes industry expertise knowledge from CTOs and hiring managers on how to achieve a high retention rate for their company.

Why Do Software Developers Seek New Opportunities?

Two certain organisational limitations are resulting in software developers actively seeking out new employment opportunities

The first is a work environment that is limited in collaboration and innovation opportunities. Many large organisations have outdated computing software that requires more effort to maintain. The maintenance of legacy systems is known to slow the progress of innovation.

ERE Recruitment Intelligence company pointed out that software developers need work environments that challenge their current skill sets.

Aaron Decker, a full-stack software engineer from ERE explains:

[M]any companies don’t give developers challenging work. They treat software engineers as data-entry workers rather than creative professionals. As a result, projects fail, work becomes unfulfilling, and employee experiences turn into death marches. Here’s what it comes down to: Software engineers are addicted to learning. New technology, challenges, languages, paradigms. Programmers like it when you throw this stuff at them. What they don’t like is stagnation.

This limitation can further result in an inability to retain talent and therefore directly impact an organization’s ability to increase the productivity of software development to maintain innovation to improve scalability, efficiency and meet customer demands.

The second limitation is a limited capacity for software developers to build their career development. LinkedIn points out strong evidence suggesting that the trouble with talent retention within the technology industry is the very high-demand for specific skills and rising compensation within the industry’s competitors. As the technology industry is continuously plagued with talent retention issues, there are clear reasons for the high turnover rate of software developers. These are primarily down to a lack of scope for career development and flat salaries.

To remain competitive and retain their top employees, industry leaders have been offering software developers the chance to have impactful organisational contributions. This incentive allows developers to have greater career development autonomy. The organisations that are unable to provide similar incentives are missing opportunities to acquire high-quality talent and achieve higher rates of employee retention.

What Are The Career Goals of Software Developers?

Software developers are thought to leave their current roles due to better compensation packages. However, from a developer’s perspective, this is not the sole reason for seeking external opportunities. A Glassdoor survey of 1,400 Software Engineers asked developers about their reasons for changing jobs. To which 78% of developers responded that compensation is the reason, but notably more than half of those engineers also said they would take less money to work in a great culture or for a great brand.

A 2015 LinkedIn survey on why people change jobs found that professionals will change jobs out of concern for career advancement, with 45% surveyed stating a lack of opportunities for improvement as the reason for leaving. While a recent study of a niche technology ecosystem found that a third of workers were planning to leave their current roles within the next year; 44% cited a lack of salary increase and career stagnation as the main reason for jumping ship.

Senior managers must create stronger incentives to improve job satisfaction and also to enhance the organisation’s software developer talent retention strategy.

How Can CTOs Improve Talent Retention And Foster Professional Growth?

BlueOptima asked three distinguished CTOs and Hiring managers within the software development industry about the importance of high employee retention rates. This is in order to understand how organisations have high talent retention rates within their engineering teams, and to provide advice aimed at addressing these challenges.

What are the trends or patterns you’ve spotted where organisations fail, which leads to low retention?

Tom Winter, Co-Founder of DevSkiller, says, “From my experience, the primary factor always tends to be related to work-life balance or finances. Organisations that experience low retention rates tend to overwork their employees and assume that paying a good wage is enough… Also, not investing enough in HR or having a solid employee development strategy can lead to low retention rates…”

While the founder of The Rosenstein Group, Darrell Rosenstein, observes that two contributing factors that affect employee retention rates.

Rosenstein explains:

First, software developers at many companies work under perpetually tight deadlines, which are often set by people who don’t understand the ins and outs of the work. This leads to a stressful work environment that can quickly lead to burn-out, especially among employees who are expected to work overtime on a regular basis with few opportunities for time off.

Second, I see a lack of appreciation for employees as contributing to high turnover rates. One of the main reasons candidates tell me they’re on the job hunt is a lack of career advancement or professional development opportunities from their previous employer. Something as simple as providing performance-based incentives or recognition programs can help your staff to feel like they have a future with the company.

Why Is The Talent Retention Rate Important Across Software Development?

The founder of The Rosenstein Group, Darrell Rosenstein, states:

The main benefit is consistency. When you have the same core staff for the long term, they gain a core of cumulative knowledge that they can build on and use with each successive project. This increases the overall productivity of the team and reduces the instances of mistakes and errors. This consistency has a positive impact on team morale, as well. Long-term team members are committed to maintaining and improving the workplace culture because they see it as their “work home”.

Additionally, Tom Winter, Co-Founder of DevSkiller, says:

I think it’s crucial due to the fact that historically developers and engineers work in highly stressful environments. The profession itself is inherently stressful, which leads to burn-out and job fatigue that are responsible for low retention rates. Given the expansion of the freelance market for skilled engineers, particularly remote-based, companies nowadays are struggling to retain top talent. So in my opinion the onus is on the business to revamp their policies and focus on retaining their best employees during this time.

While Dominic Holt, CTO at Valerian Technology points to the importance of employee retention rates as:

Retention rates at my company are at roughly 99%. Retention rate is super important for software development; it is much harder to read/learn someone else’s code and become a productive member of the team than it is to write your own code and continue contributing from what you’ve written. Regularly switching team members will annihilate productivity on the team. There is also a drag on the rest of the team any time someone is getting up to speed with a software baseline, which likewise can lead to productivity dips.

Retention rates are essential for hiring new software developers; however, it is also a crucial factor in successfully onboarding new developers.

Former Senior LinkedIn software engineer and co-founder of Holberton School for software engineers, Sylvain addresses this factor by explaining:

It takes time to get a developer to be comfortable with the specifics of a product: the codebase itself, how the architecture is working, the coding conventions of the company, documentation, the weakness of a system, and many other topics that are specific for every company, sometimes team… Productivity will only peak after some time for any engineer, and it will increase with time. Onboarding new engineers also takes time from your team. These are a few examples of why retention is extremely important.

3 tips on how your organisation has increased employee retention rates

Tom Winter points out DevSkiller’s strategy for increasing retention rates by stating:

Our strategy for making a happy workplace is both financial and non-financial. We make sure our employees have regular bonuses and benefits such as paid gym memberships, additional free days for the ones who complete the project we’re working on, and so on.

With that being said, I think that non-financial “incentives” are more important for long term retention. That’s why we’re holding frequent meetings and have more frequent employee reviews where we use the opportunity to tell our employees their work is valued, and give them guidelines and goals for the next period.

Darrell Rosenstein, the founder of The Rosenstein Group, highlights these three tips as the key to increasing development talent retention rates:

Tip 1: Use exit interviews to determine why you’re losing staff. You can’t fix a problem you don’t know about. If you notice trends or patterns in responses during exit interviews and are losing multiple employees for similar reasons, this indicates an issue that you need to address.

Tip 2: Hire for longevity. Part of achieving high retention levels is starting with high-quality employees who are a good cultural fit for the company. If you find you’re losing a lot of new hires before they reach the 6-month mark, you should re-examine your recruitment process or find new talent pools.

Tip 3:

Be proactive and responsive to employee feedback.
Make sure there’s a clear process for employees to make suggestions, lodge complaints, or voice concern about workplace issues.
Address these complaints and issues in a timely manner. If your staff feels like they have a voice in the workplace, they’ll be more likely to stick around.

How BlueOptima Achieves A Low Turnover Rate Within Software Development Teams.

To understand how BlueOptima maintained low turnover rates within its engineering teams, Chief Technology Officer Salman shares the incentives that lead to this low rate.

How does the team dynamics help to contribute to a high retention rate of engineers?
BlueOptima’s CTO Salman states:

One area often overlooked is one of the most important factors for retention is learning and development culture. A good software engineer is one who has this unquenching thirst for learning and improving. We have an ecosystem where engineers can learn and apply their knowledge. It is essential to get that ecosystem in place because it is a thriving environment for engineers. They learn on the job while working on projects, collaborating with team members, and applying the learning in their day to day activities.

These factors help individuals grow faster in all aspects of their career and advance at a much faster rate.

What incentives do you provide to engineers that allows them to feel valued and drives innovation?
BlueOptima’s CTO Salman says:

The technology landscape is changing every day, and organisations need to evolve to stay relevant and deliver better than what they did yesterday.

Nobody likes the feeling of being a small cog in a big wheel. For employees to engage and give 100%, there needs to be a sense of ownership. They need to own their work and understand what they do, why it is important and how it will bring about change. While this is the most difficult to communicate, it’s also the most effective. And every small thing that they can own in the development process helps them achieve this sense of ownership which is very fulfilling.

What care and team bonding incentives do you provide to engineers that allow them to feel valued?
BlueOptima’s CTO Salman says:

Build a strong engineering culture to improve organisational retention rates. At BlueOptima, there are tailored development plans for team members to allow engineers to be part of their professional growth, and we conduct regular feedback sessions to allow every engineer to voice their concerns.

It is essential to understand that while everyone works to get paid, not everyone wants to do unsatisfying work only to get paid.

Final Thoughts

As the demand for software development and development talent continues to grow, organisations that foster hiring longevity conditions are better positioned to improve employee retention rates and retain top talent. Initiatives aimed at building a strong collaborative culture can also present opportunities for better employee loyalty and job satisfaction.

Creating opportunities to allow engineering teams the means to provide valued impactful contributions can increase innovation. An organisation’s bottom line can benefit from improved scalability, efficiency and meet customer demands.

What Software Development Outsourcing Trends Will Matter In 2021?

BlueOptima — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:38:36 +0000

Digital advancement continues to shape the pace of innovation as technology is evolving rapidly and the need for efficient software development increases year on year. This increase has led to organisations increasing their use of software development outsourcing.

The year 2020 presented the technology industry with unforeseen challenges that reshaped its expected future software development outsourcing trends. This article focuses on the predicted software development outsourcing trends forecasted for 2021.

The Software Development Outsourcing Landscape In 2020

In 2019 the global market for software development outsourcing was reported by Statista to be worth $92.5 billion. It is forecasted to grow to 103 billion U.S dollars by 2027.

Organisations’ demand for software development have increased in recent years, resulting in an urgent need to improve internal capacity. They are more reliant on outsourcing development as a strategy to keep pace with competitors. The Global Industry Analytics, Inc. reported that the IT outsourcing market’s value is expected to grow by 5% on an annual basis between the years 2020 and 2024.

The pandemic of this past year has reshaped the factors that drive organisational need for outsourcing, including an organisation’s roadmap for digital adoption. The year 2020 caused organisations to experience unprecedented shifts in business models, internal operations and workforce participation habits. Organisations had to move to remote working; as a result dependency on digital tools increased.

For example, the financial sector had to rapidly adapt to meet an increased customer demand for online features. According to a McKinsey Global Survey Of Executives, “[d]uring the pandemic, consumers have moved dramatically toward online channels, and companies and industries have responded in turn. The survey results confirm the rapid shift toward interacting with customers through digital channels.”

It was forecasted for digital transformation to advance greatly in 2020, although the speed of change was quicker than was first predicted. According to Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2019, “the global economy’s unexpected shifts placed a great amount of pressure on the CTOs and other IT leaders to speed up the adoption of digital technologies to meet newly increased customer demand.”

Organisations surveyed by McKinsey stated that “companies have accelerated the digitisation of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years. And the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years.”

Increased focus on software development outsourcing helped organisations increase the delivery of solutions that helped them maintain operations during 2020.

The 4 Major Software Development Outsourcing Trends Expected For 2021

As organisations are increasing focus on improving strategies for outsourcing development needs, here are the four major software development outsourcing trends expected in 2021.

Greater emphasis on cybersecurity Organisations are expected to focus more on cybersecurity in 2021. As the need for software development outsourcing increases, as does the need for improved enterprise data protection. Organisations are focused on protecting their data by reducing internal and external vulnerabilities to cyberattacks in order to avoid the high cost of being hacked.

Earlier in 2020, we reported on the cybersecurity breach experienced by Waydev and the high reputational cost incurred. The 2017 Official Annual Cybercrime Report estimates that cybercrime will cost $6 trillion annually by 2021. In 2015, it cost $3 trillion.

Increased use of cloud services Forbes senior contributor Louis Columbus had predicted that 83 per cent of enterprise workloads would move to the cloud by 2020. This trend is set to continue in 2021.

To maintain agility in response to customer demands, organisations had increased use of cloud services. Analysis by Synergy Research Group into how Covid-19 affected growth figures within the wider cloud infrastructure reported cloud services spending was three times higher than expected. According to Stepwise, a Gartner report showed that companies will spend around one trillion dollars on the development of cloud infrastructure by the end of 2021.

Greater focus on product quality
Cost reduction was once the main reason an organisation would outsource software development; however, there has been a shift in recent years due to a shortage of skilled expertise available to hire for internal development needs. InfoQ reported outsourcing in the 2020 report of the National Outsourcing Association; product quality is now the main driving factor in outsourcing than cost reduction.
Building better collaborative partnerships
As organisations are focusing more on product quality than cost reductions, it requires more focus on improving communication and relationships with vendors. This increased shift and growth in the value of outsourcing are causing organisations to assess its interaction with vendors, which has shifted focus ever more so throughout 2020.

In 2021 it is expected to become more of a focusing when approaching vendors to ensure product quality is met. Speaking about this shift, Medium stated:

“This new trend of collaborative partnership is much more human-oriented. It focuses on cooperation and implementation quality, the process simplification but not the price. With such a strategic vision to help the reliable partner understand well their client’s processes, you can believe in the higher quality of the final product.”

Senior managers have recognised the importance of a collaborative relationship, its impact on quality, and ensuring the right features are delivered.

Final Thoughts

2020 placed more importance on software development and the need for organisations to rapidly adapt in order to gain competitive advantages. The industry was propelled further into the future than was initially planned, as better to current challenges required immediate solutions such as outsourcing.

Software development outsourcing is helping organisations to build competitively advantageous solutions at a faster pace. The trends identified in this article that helped organisations during 2020 are set to continue to shape software development outsourcing in 2021.

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Why Are ‘No Code’ and ‘Low Code’ Software Development Platforms On The Rise?

BlueOptima — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:31:49 +0000

Organisations wanting to improve their software development capacity are having to find new ways of developing software for applications and websites. No code and low code platforms are the current disruptive technology industry trends that are set to greatly enhance this capability.

In recent years, there has been increased discussion around the industry disruptors low code and no code platforms. These software development industry disruptors are hailed as an opportunity for improving the industry’s challenges: limited efficiency and slowed innovation.

Senior management are turning to low code and no code platforms to help improve the delivery of customer-centric solutions. Soren Kaplan, Author of the Invisible Advantage, writing for Inc stated: “unlike other transformations that destroy existing markets, low-code and no-code software promises to make software itself even more ubiquitous than it is today.”

This article will explore why low code no code has risen in demand and what organisational challenges are contributing to the increased adoption of these tools.

What Are Low Code Software Development Platforms?

Low code platform Mendix defines low code development as a visual approach to software development. Mendix states that low code abstracts and automates every step of the application lifecycle to enable rapid delivery of various software solutions. According to a 2019 Forrester report, the low-code market will hit an annual growth rate of 40%, with spending forecasted to hit $21.2 billion by 2022.

What Are No Code Software Development Platforms?

A no code development platform is designed to help non-technical users build software applications without having to use large amounts of code.

No Code platform KissFlow explains: A no-code platform is a development platform that uses a visual development environment to allow layman users to create apps, through methods such as drag-and-drop, adding application components to create a complete application. With no-code, users don’t need prior coding knowledge to create apps.

Why Is There A Rise In ‘Low Code’ And ‘No code’ Platforms?

These platforms are gathering attention from organisations seeking to equip their software developers with tools that will improve efficiency and agility. The hope is that these platforms will help improve the engineering teams’ skill set while increasing capabilities.

There are three main challenges low code and no code platforms aim to address:

Digital transformation is slow due to the high cost to maintain legacy systems Senior managers are unable to drive digital transformation at a rapid pace because large amounts of resources are dedicated to maintaining legacy systems. Moreover, the engineering teams are unable to focus on improving efficiency and innovation. As a result, the organisation is slow to transform digitally.

Software development company Audacia’s The Cost of Legacy IT, states: “It’s estimated 90% of businesses are held back in terms of growth and enhanced efficiency due to old technology. And half of senior IT leaders state that legacy systems are the main barrier to digital transformation blocking their organisation’s progress.”

Limited capacity in IT departments resulting in a slow delivery of custom applications. IT Departments face the challenge of an ever-growing backlog due to not having the capacity to deliver on customisation and features to meet internal demands.

One contributing factor to this slow delivery is a growing skills gap within the department. Global Knowledge reports that over 80% of North American IT departments have skills gaps. Globally, IT skills gaps have increased by 155% in three years.

The increasing skill and software developer shortage. Organisations seek strategies to address the shortage of software developers; more focus is placed on improving learning and development strategies to help keep engineering teams’ skill set adaptive. Although there are still limitations to these strategies, as the capacity required to build applications remains low.

Gartner reports that the demand for business applications is 5x higher than internal organisations’ capacity. The primary factor contributing to this limited capacity is the shortage of software developers and IT professionals.

It is these organisational challenges that are directly associated with the rise in low code and no code platforms. Technology industry thought contributor Danine Midura from StarfishETL writing on the rise of these platforms states, “[i]n a world where digital innovation plays a starring role in business growth, automation and speed can mean the difference between leaping ahead or falling dangerously behind.”

How Are Low Code And No Code Platforms Beneficial To An Organisation’s IT Department Capacity?

Low code platforms such as Mendix, Spring Boot and Outsystem are seen as beneficial vendors because they are offering organisations better agility and help to improve team efficiency.

The Forrester Wave 2019 report, which surveyed global developers, 23% reported they were using low-code platforms in 2018, and another 22% planned to do so within a year. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms research into the importance of low code predicts that over 50% of all application development will be low code by 2023.

Senior managers are continuously looking for tools that will help improve organisational software development efficiency, reduce development time and provide smarter ways for engineering teams to progress with work.

Low code platforms can improve capabilities to meet business demands, but there are limitations as to the level of agility that can be offered.

One disadvantage to using low code tools is the limited level of customisation to the software an organisation is allowed. MRC, a global software company specialising in web application development spoke to Technologist & Innovation Strategist Andrew Bellay from MetaNeer Labs Inc. about the Pros and cons of low-code development platforms.

According to Andrew Bellay:

When building custom software, developers are only limited by the hardware and the capabilities of the native language. Low-code platforms are much more constrained. Businesses might not be able to get the exact functionality they want or need. Options for the user interface and flow are often very limited as well, typically making low-code platforms a poor choice for consumer-facing apps, especially mobile apps where UX and UI expectations are very high.

No code platforms are considered to have further customisable limitations than low code, though no code platforms are seen as being faster at building applications. The grab, and drop format of no code tools are deemed beneficial for non-technical users who can be more involved in the development process.

Despite the customisation limitations, both low code and no code are deemed to be beneficial tools set to increase speed and reduce development cost.

The Forrester Wave 2019, goes on to report on customer cost. It states that, a low-cost-of-entry commercial model. Customers value low-code development platforms they can adopt at will for a very low cost — without requiring formal paid training courses to build business apps.

Kissflow points out that no code platforms such as theirs are helping IT departments increase productivity by reducing the backlog of internal departmental requests. Kissflow states:

This is what you’re actually interested in. Agile organisations and reduced costs mean nothing if you’re not actually getting any work done. Since these no-code apps can be built at a much faster pace, the IT staff aren’t overloaded with requests from every other department. In turn, fewer people are waiting for you so they can get their work done. They’re already making their own apps and working.

Improved engineering teams productivity can be beneficial to the development process, although CIO.com notes speed can also be a disadvantage associated with low code and no code platforms. According to CIO.com, “[s]low down a bit. It’s nice that the tools are fast, but it can be a mistake to rush software development. As coding becomes easier, the real challenge is defining the application and imagining its role in the lives of the customers.

Organisations are seeking to have a more customer-centric approach. It is this need to meet customer demands that are driving the beneficial rise of low code and no code platforms.

How Are IT departments’ Software Development Productivity Impacted By ‘No Code’ And ‘Low Code’?

As low code and no code platforms gained recognition, these platforms were first seen as a threat to the credibility of software development.

As first explained by Jason Bloomberg, former contributor for Forbes:

IT departments are also pushing back, often with a vengeance. Not only do the various denizens in IT fear for their jobs, but Low-Code/No-Code also threatens their credibility. After all, IT has been telling business stakeholders for years that the six month/million dollar plan is the only way to build enterprise software.

Contrary to this understanding, low code and no code platforms require different levels of technical skill set to use, both from software developers and other members of the software development department.

No code tools are aimed at filling the skills gap and addressing the shortage of software developers with organisations filling this gap with citizen developers. The Gartner definition of a citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.

Citizen developers are the ones tasked with using no code platforms while the expertise of software engineers are needed for low code platforms as they require a higher technical skill-set.

Forbes thought leadership contributor John Everhard in the article The Pros And Cons Of Citizen Development stated:

However, low-code platforms do assume a certain degree of technical knowledge, whereas the more cutting-edge no-code platforms require less technical knowledge and skill in its business users who are supported by IT managing the technical infrastructure. But users do need to have an in-depth understanding of specific process and customer engagement challenges weighing their company down. They might lack the expertise to build using traditional programming, but they can create rich applications using graphical building tools.

The adoption of low code platforms into engineering teams workflow or the introduction of no code platform users continues to rise because organisations consider it a helpful improvement to capacity.

To allow for the use of these platforms, senior managers require buy-in from their software developers to introduce the use of low code or no code platforms.

For example, an OutSystems case study on IOOF demonstrated how low code helps to increase delivery capacity and restructure the use of resources to put more effort into innovation and less on maintenance.

IOOF’s challenge and actions:

Challenge

Although low-code sounds appealing, forcing its adoption on all of your developers could risk demotivation and departures that you can ill afford. How can you introduce it, and develop some early successes, that will win others to the cause?
Action Plan

If this sounds like your situation, this case study from IOOF should provide some useful inspiration. Sharam Hekmat, CIO at this wealth management company, wanted to introduce low-code to speed-up delivery and eliminate an increasing backlog of digital projects.
The key elements of IOOF’s approach were as follows:

The best low-coders turned out to be legacy developers because of their traditional systems analysis skills and superior business knowledge.
Several of the apps built during the competition went on to become productive systems.
LOOF’s departmental embrace in OutSytem’s low code platform resulted in a low code team of 15 senior software developers effectively using the platform, which allows them to apply their knowledge to a new area of focus.

Low code and no code platforms will change the way engineering teams are structured but, in the case of LOOF it is a shift that will further integrate the development process with organisational requirements.

The Alternative Approach To Low Code And No Code

Innovation has slowed in most organisations, and the shortage of software developers with the right level of expertise continues to grow despite this rise in low code and no code.

Alternatively, to help the department to maintain scalability, efficiency and customisation across IT projects, organisations must invest more into learning and development. Senior managers considering the use of low code or no code platforms must first ensure to invest more into building their development talents’ current skill sets.

This investment helps engineering teams improve their capacity by influencing collaboration which influences culture, the types of projects they work on and allows them the ability to gain experience in new areas to improve their work environment.

IT Vendor Management: 3 Key Practices To Effectively Evaluate Software Vendors

BlueOptima — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 21:16:06 +0000

It is now more common for organisations to outsource parts or all of their software development needs, instead of hiring internally in order to reduce resources used in the hiring process.

There are two main reasons many organisations will outsource software development; for access to a broader level of expertise and reduce cost. A Statistics Brain survey into the benefits of outsourcing observed that in the United States 43% of companies are outsourcing IT jobs; 34% of these organisations do so for access to a larger pool of IT talent. Also, 59% of organisations report the use of outsourcing to reduce their business expenses.

To help meet this capacity, more focus is placed on outsourcing parts or all software development needs to IT outsourcing companies. Softelligence points out that in the upcoming year of 2021, software development is the area where most companies expect to place focus. According to a CompTIA trends report, the organisations surveyed will put a 57% focus on software development.

A successful collaboration with a credible IT outsourcing company can improve the capabilities of internal software development teams to allow for innovation. While collaboration is the goal for an effective vendor management process; without visibility and control into the relationship with the outsourced development team, an organisation can succumb to an outsourcing failure. Dun & Bradstreet’s Barometer of Global Outsourcing states that 20 to 25% of all outsourcing relationships fail within two years, and 50% fail within five.

Currently, organisations use screening CVs and vendor recommendations to verify the credibility of vendors ahead of onboarding them. However, this approach to vendor evaluation is problematic as it does not confirm that deliverables will meet quality requirements once onboarded.

There’s No Quick Way To Avoid Organisational Expenses From Onboarding A Vendor That Wasn’t The Right Fit

An organisation’s IT vendor management team needs a source and screening tool to find the right outsourced software development talent. Vendor management teams need a practical evaluation of outsourced development teams. They need to be sure vendors provide teams that can positively contribute to the organisation’s development and deliver on projects that adhere to industry standards.

BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment tool helps vendor management teams to select the right software vendor. It ensures company resources are not underutilised, and outsourced development teams align with the organisation’s software development culture and standard.

This article discusses how Predictive Assessment helps the vendor management evaluation process to screen and ensure productive outsourced developers are onboarded.

3 Best Practices For A Successful Collaborative Vendor Engagement Process

1. Assess the capabilities of individual software developer skills to ensure access to adequate levels of technical expertise

Most organisations’ approach towards gaining the most effective use of resources is a competitive preferred supplier list. Conversely, a select supplier list may not always ensure that an organisation has access to the right level of technical expertise and the correct number of qualified developers.

Vendor management teams run the risk of not thoroughly screening vendors. During the evaluation process, a vendor could offer a development team that is highly productive and collaborative. Still, if an organisation pays on a per developer basis, these individual software developer’s skills must be equally sufficient.

With the help of Predictive Assessment, vendor management teams can evaluate whether the chosen shortlist has the right software developer skills for a project’s needs. It produces analytical data based on the assessment of the developers’ approach to problem-solving; therefore building a profile of individual developers’ problem-solving ability and compatibility with an organisation’s software development practice.

Furthermore, this level of insight can make sure that vendors are thoroughly screened. Vendor management teams can have input to ensure that the vendor will select the right software developers that are able to deliver the correct solutions based on accurate KPIs and metrics.

2. Determine whether the vendor’s code quality standards are aligned with industry and the organisation’s standards

It is essential to understand the expertise level of software developers; it is also vital to evaluate and ensure the vendor has built a team of software developers that can maintain high code quality standards and safely contribute into an organisation’s software development codebase.

Each vendor will adhere differently to industry standards and best practices; the vendor evolution process must identify what the best practices outsourced development team follows, and it adheres to industry level code quality standards.

It is equally important that the process should evaluate that those standards align with the organisation’s software development standards. A potential misalignment on software development standards can result in solutions that negatively impact an organisation’s technology stack, the maintainability of the codebase and internal engineering teams output.

For example, if the vendor’s development team is keen to show their productivity but are not aligned with the internal engineering team’s best practices. The outsourced development team can be disruptive by contributing code to the organisation’s codebase that causes it to become out of shape. This creates technical debt for internal engineering teams because they have to dedicate time to correct the problem.

BlueOptima has observed from client and vendor collaboration history the impact this misalignment has on the productivity of an organisation’s internal engineering teams. Situations such as clients having onboarded an outsourced development team using advanced techniques that provide useful functionality, but the solutions are far off the coding standards of the client’s organisation. Consequently, the client’s internal engineering teams are not able to follow up on the vendor’s work.

BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment helps vendor management teams identify which of the proposed IT outsourcing company’s software developers can consistently deliver high-level solutions in a maintainable way. It is able to help the vendor evaluation process to determine for each developer, how compatible are their problem-solving skills with internal company coding standards.

3. Closer collaborate with IT outsourcing companies for greater transparency

IBEF reports that India accounts for one of the largest software vendors in the world, with 75% global digital talent is present in the country. EquityMaster’s research reveals a similar outcome, with India accounting for 55% market share of the US$185-190 billion global sourcing business.

A challenge most organisations face with an outsourced engineering team is ineffective collaboration. As a result, a communication barrier can potentially lead to an organisational software development culture clash.

How do vendor managers make sure outsourced development teams will be productive and collaborate effectively with internal engineering teams?

For example, BlueOptima has clients who have outsourced large portions of their software development to India. With the help of Predictive Assessment, they have been able to identify where underperforming teams are experiencing blockers and provide straightforward solutions to overcome these issues to encourage effective collaboration. Often the cause is a lack of proper communication that leads to ineffective collaboration.

To have effective collaboration between internal engineering teams and outsourced development teams, senior managers must work together with vendors to set expectations across projects. It is crucial to outline the roles of outsourced development teams and encourage the use of communication tools (such as Slack, Happeo, Asana, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams) across both internal and external teams.

A Trusted Way To Ensure Your Organisation Makes The Right Hiring Decisions

Industry leaders with established best practices are gaining a competitive advantage. Successful vendor evaluation processes are helping organisations to faster achieve their business goals by providing added flexibility and filling a skills gap.

The vendor evaluation process needs to find the balance between the right set of skills that will deliver value for money and creating a lasting collaborative engagement. This value for money is not merely finding the most affordable vendor, but it depends on the quality of work offered.

With the help of BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment, organisations can achieve a higher return on investment, maintain effective communication and deliver quality solutions

Coding Tests: The Rise Of Code Assessment Platforms And Software Developer Recruitment

BlueOptima — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 15:26:58 +0000

Despite the pandemic, software developer recruitment and filling business-critical technical roles remains a necessity. Recruitment consultancy firm Morgan Mckinley told CIO.com: “Software engineers, IT auditors, cybersecurity experts and data and analytics professionals will continue to be in demand.”

A Randstad Key Talent Impacted By COVID-19 report observed that data and software development roles saw an increase in volume (1% and 8% respectively). Hiring managers are focused on maintaining the hiring process to fill critical business roles by adopting new virtual hiring processes.

Organisations have increased usage of code assessment platforms to help reach the goal of making quick hiring decisions. Simultaneously reducing potential bias during the software developer recruitment process, such as HackerRank, Codility, HackerEarth, CoderPad, Qualified and Coderbyte.

These platforms can potentially improve the remote interview transition and speed at which hiring managers fill technical positions. An industry trends guide by Coderbyte reported that code assessment platforms now claim that they can reduce interviewing timeframes by 50%. Although this may be true, it is only half the challenge as to accurately determine a candidate’s on-the-job potential remains a challenge to do without bias.

How can hiring managers engage with highly productive software developers as efficiently and reliably as possible? Firstly, they must evaluate candidates in a way that accurately predicts on-the-job performance without subjectivity to be sure they are the right organisational fit.

This article discusses why using BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment is a better approach to help hiring managers reach this goal, especially in a remote working environment.

The New Virtual Hiring Process Of Assessing Technical Skills Is Limited In Capability

The new virtual technical interview process consists of more or less the same stages now using video conference tools and technical screening platforms. Code assessment platforms can improve the number of candidates as they support several technologies, languages, algorithm challenges and simple programming problems.

However, these platforms are limited in their ability to objectively evaluate whether the candidate is a good quality fit. It is difficult to predict the potential productivity of a developer using isolated test scores. These platforms are not useful in solving the real underlying problem: predicting candidate performance.

Geoff Roberts from Qualified, in an article on Why Some Developers Hate Coding Skills Tests expresses, “The vast majority of assessments test algorithmic skills rather than actual programming ability. The coding tests represent a computer science problem that has little to do with assessing an engineer’s ability to deliver the work they’d actually find themselves doing on a day-to-day basis.”

Qualified’s approach to technical skills assessment uses coding assessments and pair programming interviews. Although pair programming can be advantageous in speeding up the onboarding process to increase team collaboration immediately, it is not a reliable or consistent approach to assess the core programming and problem-solving skills of a developer, due to limitations in subjective approaches.

This approach is also limited in predictive capability as it focuses on code correctness based on test scores instead of assessing the core programming skills of a developer. This approach is just one of a vast granularity of metrics that can be leveraged to understand a developer’s potential performance, even within the limitations of coding assessments.

Hiring managers and talent leads need to hire software developers who can safely contribute to their projects. They need to understand how a software developer will be able to solve problems that will occur specifically within their organisation’s development environment.

How To Effectively Evaluate Candidates To Accurately Predict On-The-Job Performance

During the virtual hiring process, it is ever more important for hiring managers to have speed and accuracy that will ensure they are hiring productive developers.

They need a reliable and consistent approach to measuring the data from technical skills assessments. BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment is one solution that correlates with a developer’s behaviour in coding tests and real-life settings to determine workplace performance.

Three factors are combined to offer a holistic approach that helps to achieve the goal of efficiently and reliably hiring more productive engineers:

1. Testing Approach

Predictive Assessment focuses on a developer’s core programming and problem-solving skills rather than testing knowledge retention. It assesses the core programming ability that is adaptable across libraries and frameworks; this optimises for fundamentally strong programmers, rather than framework knowledge.

BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment was designed in collaboration with Cambridge professors and software engineering professionals to highlight holistic core programming fundamentals. It is able to identify highly capable and adaptive software engineers.

2. Core Assessment Metrics

Software developers are known to dislike the limitations of code assessment platforms because they feel the process does not showcase their full potential.

Most code assessment platforms will only test one aspect of the developer’s skills set because the coding test is built on one or two metrics such as the traditionally used correctness metric. Predictive Assessment has four metrics that offer a more holistic view of a software developer’s ability. It measures RAM usage, computational efficiency, robustness (edge cases satisfied) and correctness.

These metrics are individually assessed against multiple test cases using BlueOptima’scontainerisation technology: ‘POTTERY’.

Predictive Assessment offers an intuitive user experience to improve a developer’s experience during the process, allowing them to comfortably showcase an essential set of their skills. In return, it builds credibility with the organisation for providing an interactive process.

3. Predictive Scoring

Instead of a code assessment based on subjective results, hiring managers can identify the relationship between a developer’s behaviour during coding tests and real-life settings. It gives an accurate predictive measure of a software developer’s potential performance.

This helps hiring managers have a straightforward way to understand the software developer’s potential performance by evaluating how a candidate’s skill-set would fit within the organisation’s engineering teams. The assessment is based on organisational data to give hiring managers insight into the relation between existing software developers and the global threshold.

This insight can help hiring managers better understand future performance and be sure that the software developers are the right fit.

Organisations want to hire the most productive software developers and hope that the technical screening process will attract the best quality candidates. Predictive Assessment offers hiring managers, and talent leads a better and robust approach in finding and evaluating high-quality candidates who are the perfect fit for an organisation.

Discover how to reliably hire the right software developers for your organisation with Predictive Assessment which is now available free for the next 3 months.

Why Are There So Few Female Software Developers?

BlueOptima — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 16:49:04 +0000

Introduction

A lack of diversity can limit an organisation’s innovation. Therefore, senior managers must do more to support diversity and realise the competitive advantage diversity can bring software development team dynamics and productivity rates of development.

It is commonly known within the technology industry that men dominate software development roles. A 2020 global software developer survey demonstrated that female software developers are greatly underrepresented, accounting for just 8 per cent of positions in this field.

This article will discuss why there are fewer women in software development roles and how organisations are seeking to improve awareness regarding diversity and inclusion.

Reasons Behind The Gender Gap In The Software Development Field

Women are underrepresented across the technology industry, so this isn’t solely an issue of female software developers. A major factor for this underrepresentation is that men dominate roles within the industry. They are far more likely to pursue academic fields of study that will lead to professional careers within the technology industry. There is a degree gap between women and men seeking STEM degrees (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). According to the recent UCAS data provided by HESA, just 35 per cent of STEM students in higher education in the U.K. are women.

PWC research on Women in Tech also noted that women are less likely to consider a career in technology; only 3 per cent of women state it as their first choice. In academic institutes, women are less likely to be suggested or encouraged to pursue a career in technology; only 16 per cent of women have had a career in technology suggested to them.

Moreover, women still account for a small percentage of software developers, while a smaller percentage hold senior roles in the technology industry. Technical recruiting platform BuiltIn noted that women software engineer hires have only increased by 2 per cent over the last 20 years. In fact, there is a lack of representation of women within the industry. According to the PWC research, 78 per cent of students cannot name famous women working in technology.

The Gender Gap In The Tech Industry

It has been a consistent challenge for organisations to improve the lack of diversity in software development roles. Data from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) shows that the employment gap was significant: as of 2015, women only accounted for 25 per cent of computing occupations.

Despite this lack of diversity and underrepresentation of women, foundations are working to close the gap. Foundations such as Girls Who Code, Women who code, We are Tech Women, Girls in Tech, Black Girls Code and Ladies Learning Code. They are offering women and young girls opportunities to understand the field, which is encouraging more women to pursue technical subjects academically and pursue roles as software developers.

More female software developers such as Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, are leading the awareness for providing female role models within the industry. In recent years more women are pursuing roles in STEM subjects. Data from the National Science Foundation found that more women are earning STEM degrees and closing the gap with men achieving bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering subjects.

Despite this growing awareness, organisations must do more to revise diversity policies to improve the diversity and underrepresentation of women in technical roles.

How Are Organisations Making Engineering Teams More Inclusive?

Currently, female software developers are less likely than their male counterparts to remain in their existing roles or stay in the field long enough to progress to a senior position. Organisations must find new ways to increase the engineering teams’ diversity to close the gap further.

Industry leaders who are taking measures to improve support and awareness of diversity are showing other organisations the roadmap to improve its diversity and inclusion. Here are the three initiatives being focused on to improve the retention rates of women in technical positions.

1) Reduce potential hiring bias and encourage more women into the hiring pipeline

To support organisational gender diversity and inclusion, senior managers have to ensure the hiring process appeals to underrepresented groups. A Hewlett Packard Internal benchmark reported by ABC News recognised that women are much less likely to apply for a job if they do not meet 100 per cent of the criteria, compared to males who apply even only meeting 60 per cent of the criteria.

To help organisations address this bias, STEMwomen stated that a gender neutral recruitment process can reduce bias and encourage more women into the hiring pipeline. The same study also explained that implementing blind hiring techniques can reduce bias. They state that a process consisting of blind candidate screening, pre-employment testing and insisting that shortlists include an equal share of women to create better awareness.

To reduce potential hiring bias, job descriptions must demonstrate a commitment towards opportunities for career advancement within a technical role and demonstrate the company’s awareness of creating an inclusive environment.

*2) Better partnership with academic institutions to create graduate programmes and internal awareness schemes *

As more academic awareness is placed on getting young women interested in studying STEM subjects, it is beneficial for organisations to be involved in graduate and intern initiatives.

These initiatives can widen the talent pool and address the software developer shortage currently experienced in the industry. Organisations such as PwC’s Women in Tech programme are aimed at giving students experience and insight into technology opportunities. Students can shadow professionals in rules such as Cyber Security, Technology, Data and Analytics and eForensics.

Furthermore, Forbes reported on Google’s 2019 diversity report which demonstrated some improvement, particularly in its internship program, “[g]lobally, 40 per cent of interns in technical roles were women in 2019, and 24 per cent of U.S. interns were black and Latinx.”

It is little progress in the right direction to improving women’s representation in technical roles. In Google’s 2018 diversity report, analysed by Wire demonstrated improvements of women in technical roles. Google reports that 30.9 per cent of its global staff are women – up from 30.6 per cent in 2014. However these improvements are small and more must be done by organisations, such as Google to improve gender diversity.

3) Foster an inclusive culture by frequently evaluating diversity and inclusion policies

Organisations that foster a more inclusive culture have better employee engagement and retention. A McKinsey survey on understanding organizational barriers to a more inclusive workplace found that a sense of inclusion is strongly linked with employee engagement. The survey respondents who feel included are much more likely than others to say they feel fully engaged in terms of excitement and commitment to their organisations.

Industry leaders are more regularly evaluating diversity and inclusion initiatives more regularly to ensure alignment with workplace values. This evaluation can help to determine what further actions are needed to improve employee engagement and a more diverse workforce.

Final Thoughts

There is far more progress that needs to be made by organisations to significantly improve diversity in technical roles that will benefit an organisation’s bottom line. Industry leaders are discovering the benefits that gender diversity can bring to their software development performance.

More organisations are noticing that supporting a diverse and inclusive workforce can bring unique perspectives. This difference in team dynamics can improve enterprise innovation and reduce cost. A McKinsey 2015 analysis on why diversity matters found data that supports a correlation with gender diversity and organisation performance improvement.

McKinsey’s expanded 2018 analysis found that “[…] companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on their executive teams were 15 per cent more likely to experience above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile. In our expanded 2017 dataset, this number rose to 21 per cent and continued to be statistically significant.”

A diverse engineering team is more dynamic and better positioned in organisational value creation. A more gender diverse team is more creative and innovative. Further research by NCWIT on What Impact Does Gender Diversity have on Bottom-line Performance showed that gender-balanced companies demonstrate better team dynamics and productivity rate. They also perform better financially, particularly when women occupy a significant proportion of top management positions.

Software Developer Recruitment: How Companies Can Avoid Mis-Hires

BlueOptima — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 15:54:00 +0000

Organisations that have large scale software development operations need accessible tools (online coding test platforms) to source, assess and recruit qualified software developers.

To accomplish software developer recruitment goals, hiring managers and technical recruiters must employ high-quality software developers who are the right fit and avoid a costly mis-hire.

Introduction

In most organisations, the first step in hiring is the screening of candidates by technical recruiters to filter and shortlist the potential best. They have to fill positions efficiently with the right candidates while keeping up with software developer recruitment goals and meet the expectations of hiring managers.

Despite the growing number of tech graduates in recent years, according to Jobvite’s 2018 Job Seeker Nation Report 67% of recruiters still struggle to find top-quality candidates with the right skills. A potential mis-hire could result in a loss of resources if the candidate quality is not the right.
To re-hire for a technical role will use more resources according to Recruiter advice from the co-founder of CodinGame Aude Barral, the cost of a mis-hire can be anywhere from 5 to 27 times an employee’s actual salary.

A mis-hire for a tech position that pays £45k per year could cost an organisation anywhere from £225k to £1.21million.

It becomes a challenge for technical recruiters to fill roles quickly whilst simultaneously avoiding the risk of mis-hiring. Therefore, how does the hiring manager improve the decision-making process and be sure a technical recruiter will secure software developers that have the right skill-set?
This article discusses how technical recruiters and hiring managers can hire the right candidates with an approach tailored to their organisation’s needs using BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment.

Unsuccessful Software Developer Recruitment Caused By Misaligned Hiring Goals

Hiring managers and technical recruiters want to achieve the same goal; recruiting the right technical talent as efficiently as possible. However, they have different objectives to fill during the technical recruiting process.

It is commonly known that they find it hard to align on these goals. If collaboration between quality of shortlisted candidates and decision making is not effective it can lead to a potential mis-hire. Moreover, this misalignment can lead to an organisation losing out on high-quality talent due to difficulties making timely decisions. According to a Gartner report, organisations that drive decisive hiring manager behaviours reduce time-to-fill by 17%.

Hiring managers and technical recruiters cannot afford to lose out on quality candidates considering the current shortage of software developers. Competition for top talent is high; therefore, it is even more critical to hire the right talent. In contrast, it is argued that there is not a lack of talent but a limited number of quality candidates with the relevant skills.
According to HackerNoon; “The shortage is one of quality — a lack of well-studied, experienced engineers with a formal and deep understanding of software engineering.” Although this may be true, one reason that leads to a limited candidate shortlist is the ineffective use of screening and technical assessment platforms which can lead to improper decision making.

Software Engineer thought contributor Glen McCallum suggests that “Companies are using 3rd party code challenges as a filter to reduce the number of applicants. Many quality senior devs are screened out because they don’t regularly practice that type of problem-solving. Then the companies that are hiring senior devs complain that they can’t find any ‘good’ ones.”

Consequently, organisations need a technical assessment tool that provides the most effective use of the talent acquisition process. BlueOptima’s Predictive Assessment is a remote technical assessment software that provides a more reliable decision-making experience.

Online Coding Test For Successful Software Developer Recruitment

Here are the three main practices hiring managers and technical recruiters can align on to meet hiring goals with the help of Predictive Assessment:

1) A streamlined and automated tool for the screening process

Technical recruiters need a suitable online coding test platform that can effectively screen and build a pipeline of qualified candidates. An automated tool can help to streamline the process to present candidates that have the relevant skills needed to fill the requirements of the role.

Predictive Assessment is an automated platform that presents a better quality of developer talent specific to the software developer recruitment goals identified by an organisation’s development needs.

2) Hiring without bias by using a data-driven technical recruitment tool

Hiring managers need to be empowered during the software developer recruitment process to achieve effective decision making. A function of Predictive Assessment will give the decision-maker a suite of analytical components to enable them to analyse a candidate’s performance contextually.

Ultimately, this approach fosters effective involvement from both hiring managers and technical recruiters in being sure the right software developer talent is identified.

3) A consistent hiring process can make for effective decision making

Finding software developer talent that is the right engineering team fit is the primary goal for both technical recruiters and hiring managers to achieve. Predictive Assessment offers a straightforward way to understand the potential work a candidate can contribute to an organisation’s software development and how that will fit with existing engineering teams output.

This approach helps hiring managers and technical recruiters create a consistent hiring process that is tailored to their organisation’s needs, and does not disrupt the productivity of innovation within engineering teams.

Sign up to learn more about a trusted way to make sure you make the right hiring decisions for your organisation: Predictive Assessment is currently free for the next 3 months.

The Original Article Can Be Found Here: https://www.blueoptima.com/blog/software-developer-recruitment-how-companies-can-avoid-mis-hires

Agile processes are key to efficient software development: effectively navigate your developer teams amidst COVID-19

BlueOptima — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 13:58:25 +0000

Introduction

During the Coronavirus outbreak, you are playing an integral role in navigating the crisis, and there is an urgency to lessen the implications of COVID-19 on your organisation’s software development infrastructure. To that effect, we are continuing to bring you articles aimed at helping you to support your developer teams, as with our previous article on How Engineering Leaders Can Support Remote Working Teams During Coronavirus Pandemic. In this article, we will be discussing how to maintain productive remote software development by exploring the essential best practices of agile processes.

Software Development Teams During Covid

Your business operation, like every other organisation, is looking for ways to strengthen your strategy playbooks. Global organisations are continuing to prioritise support to employees’ safety while ensuring that the company can continue to function in a remote work environment. You were made responsible for implementing the right tools and strategy that will make remote work functionality for engineers possible in a potentially isolated environment.

The software engineering department could be experiencing the most strain as they are heavily reliant on team connectivity and readily available sets of engineering tools to develop software in a distributed team environment. Your software development framework for developing software is currently experiencing tremendous pressure to lessen any potential hits to your infrastructure.

In the coming weeks, your software development framework will have to be flexible to sustain remote working and a potential recovery strategy within your organisation. Agile processes are better adapted to be flexible in the present time; if you have been running an agile methodology, then discipline around this is being tested. If you have not, there are things you can learn from agile software development; Scrum, Kanban, Lean, CI/CD, DevOps, that will benefit your current process now moved to remote software development.

Whether your software development teams are internal or outsourced, some of the challenges faced in a remote environment can be resolved with the help of agile processes as part of the solution. These challenges are prevalent even before the current extreme move, some include:

Different time zones
Communication complications about code or business needs and design requirements
Support and response time to deal with blockers
Collaboration between different development cultures
Prioritisation of development tasks
Experiencing a drop in suboptimal quality and team productivity

Let us take a look at some valuable strategies that can add invaluable insights into your current approach to bridge remote development teams and software development to help mitigate potential issues and reduce friction.

Strategy To Manage Remote Software Development

What makes agile processes valuable in the current economic state of unpredictability, is the ability to connect as it favours communication and close collaboration to be effective at delivering value no matter of team members location. The given nature of agile software development is the ability to swiftly anticipate change and rapidly adapt to provide results during the software development life cycle. Your communication with engineers and communication between team members will need to be rapid to compensate for changes in a work from home set-up. You will be aware of this but may not be informed as to how much it can help developer teams when in practice.

Steve Denning once wrote in an article, Why Agile is Eating the World, for Forbes that: “Agile organisations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time. They are capable of delivering instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale.”

Many organisations, including your own, could be working in a software development environment which is stable with little unpredictability where new knowledge is not necessary for the creation. But, if your software development process is less agile and more of the traditional waterfall paradigm, being connected all the time can help lessen the friction of miscommunication, however small, that can occur in a remote work environment.

Your software development team now remote and dependent on communication tools to be productive can work by the following 8 agile principles to be effective at delivering value.

Prioritisation of development tasks
Creating a priority list like a Scrum backlog will have the most crucial tasks at the top in a task tracking system or a centralised task tracker, so the team will know what needs to be delivered first.
Set regular meetings
Lessen communication complications about code or business needs and requirements with regular meetings. These meetings can look such as daily meetings, morning kick-offs and evening end of day round-ups or closers for teams to discuss progress. Another practical step as a manager you can take is being able to communicate via email efficiently to further keep the lines of communication open and varied for non-time sensitive requirements or updates.
Working in small collaborative cross-functional teams
Working in a small team helps bridge the gap in collaboration between different development cultures and makes them faster at adapting to change.
Strong, agile senior support
Set regular check-ins to provide support to respond promptly to any blockers experienced, in real-time with live communication platforms such as Slack.
Clear guidelines for bug reports,
Clear guidelines for bug reports can help for effective filing while having clear definitions on how to report work completed, to allow for transparency across teams and processes. Lessen the time for the team to adapt to new decisions by effectively communicating decisions and changes implemented to the team for them to understand the importance and awareness of those decisions.
Jira planning
As a senior member of the organisation, you must continue with Jira planning. This type of plan is integral to the communication of an agile work environment; having tasks broken down into manageable tasks for ease of understanding and evaluating the results is a sure way to optimise transparency.
Frequent code reviews
It is of importance that project and code knowledge is distributed between teams. They can support each other by alleviating any arising issues if and where another team is unable to since they are already aware.
Centralised input log
A Singular location log for in-progress deliverables and up to date version controls that can be shared between teams and for you to have an overview of what is in progress.

Your Company Operations And Security Infrastructure

Working in an agile process when remote can add flexibility and ease of collaboration, which is valuable to your software development efficiency in a remote work environment. But, what about implementing planned work?

A fundamental part of the framework Scrum is planning, as teams work in small iterations called sprints, continuous planning improvement that can help the functionality of your team. Sprint planning covers each eventuality the development can take. Since your teams are having to adapt quickly to the move of remote software development, sprint planning can help you preempt and have solutions ready for issues that can arise that will need to be dealt with in a limited time.

Additionally, to have adaptively planned will further benefit when unplanned work is presented to the team. Unplanned work can hinder productivity if not able to be anticipated by the developer team. One of the key benefits of DevOps is planning for unexpected work that could slow team efficiency. The evolution of agile processes leverages visibility and proactivity foresight of collaboration between the development and IT operations teams, enabling them to anticipate unplanned work better. Encourage the sharing of responsibility, having transparency and feedback, which is a fundamental of DevOps teams.

Incorporating better collaboration and integration in a remote environment between the development team and the IT operations team is aimed at bettering communication, team efficiency at delivering business value and faster software.

To achieve this functionality in your strategy:

Encourage your development teams to invite key operation team members to listen in on calls during sprint planning, morning kick-offs, daily stand-ups or evening round-ups. Operation teams should involve developer team leads in their meetings to keep each other informed and aware of progress and blockers.
Create a fast feedback loop to resolve issues. Once there is seamless communication, transparency will enable teams to resolve issues faster and minimise system failures.

These enable your teams to work smarter no matter a remote work environment for software development. These will include the administrative and operational support to help with fast set-up and maintenance of teams functionality to deliver value in a remote setting. Secondly, security is of importance in such an environment to minimise infrastructure vulnerabilities.

Here are some reminders:

Allocated equipment log for developers to function as they would in the office.
Encourage software development teams to use disk encryption.
Developers have access to centralised data storage to avoid storing data on unrelated work devices.
Developers have access to company systems and accounts.
Carry out regular password updates.
Set reminders to teams to update their passwords if your company uses a VPN.
Developers home Wi-Fi’s are password secure for work use and data handling.

KPIs For A Remote Software Development Process

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) even in a remote work environment, is beneficial for you to evaluate the process while being able to adapt and create a more effective distributed team. Simple identification of areas for improvement and better dedication of development scope which can help to navigate software development when remote. You can give your development teams added foresight about how to better their productivity, projection of the project’s health and team efficiency.

Whether your teams are currently in the earlier phases of designing and coding, or whether in later phases of quality assurance testing, deployment or maintenance of the software development life cycle. The productivity of a remote software development process does not have to experience a decline. These elements adapted to your strategy or better utilised in your approach will add deserved flexibility. And, rapid adaptation can help your organisation to maintain efficiency and capability during remote software development.

The 10X Developer Myth: Why This Concept Fails To Deliver Meaningful Software Development Productivity Gains

BlueOptima — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 15:02:12 +0000

Introduction

The 10x developer who is 10 times more productive than others has been a concept up for debate in the technology industry for decades. It remains an unproven concept with many claiming to have worked with one, to be one or are seeking to hire one.

Senior leaders want the best and most efficient talent for their software development operation, to deliver solutions faster. However, benchmarking their teams’ performance using the 10x concept can increase the risk of negatively impacting productivity.

The 10x developer concept is a flawed model to use as a basis to build engineering teams. Instead of concentrating on building engineering teams by placing together supposed individual 10x developers, it is time to change the narrative of the concept to one that builds "rock-star" teams.

BlueOptima’s 5x developer approach was devised after decades of academic and commercial testing. This article aims to introduce why a 5x developer concept based on Coding Effort metric is a better approach for building an efficient engineering team.

What is a 10x Developer?

A 10x developer is generally defined as an individual who is naturally capable of being 10x times more productive than an average developer. This talented 10x developer exists on the basis of forum anecdotes within the software engineering community and contradictory experimental research that fails to prove their existence.

What are the factors that classify a 10x developer? There are no distinct factors from research or anecdotes that determine someone is a 10x developer.

A Quora thread started in 2016 asking What is the truth of 10x programmers, has multiple views from users sharing stories of working with one and how to interpret what it means to be a 10x developer. However, none of the contributors can align on the concept being authentic with credible proof as per the definition of a 10x developer.

For example, one user correctly points out that the concept misses contextual understanding about an individual’s capabilities. "The truth is that anyone can be a 10x programmer depending on the context. A lot of answers have focused on the mythical version of this concept; that they are some sort of unicorn geniuses that only think in math and have no social skills and other such nonsense."

What are the factors that make a 10x developer more productive than others?

Senior engineering leaders and software developers have tried to logically tie the concept to best practices a software developer should follow if they want to be a good developer—qualities such as being adaptable and having a commitment to continuous learning. However, this does not determine the proven factors of a 10x developer who is 10 times more productive than others.

A software developer’s productivity will vary depending on the task. Senior managers should not use this concept to evaluate their teams' productivity because a developer's skill-level will affect the time taken to complete tasks. Professor William Nichols' study Programmer Moneyball: Challenging the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity observed that 90% of developers fall within modest performance ranges. There was a lack of evidence to support the idea that some developers are naturally more efficient than others.

It highlights there are factors that can affect the productivity of software developers. In the 2019 edition of Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering, Professor Stefan Wagner and Emerson Murphy-Hill from Google explained: “Software development is a type of knowledge work that comes with even more specific difficulties, as software developers deal nowadays with incredibly large and complex systems.” This excerpt can be found in the chapter Factors That Influence Productivity: A Checklist.

The concept is void of real-life application. It fails to account for the context that different organisations will have different requirements and stakeholders. Along with the factors that software developers will be working with various technology stacks and methodologies.

The 10x developer concept overlooks team dynamics
Other than a lack of context, the concept overlooks team dynamics which are necessary for software developers to learn and improve their skills to become elite developers. Trisha Gee from JetBrains at the 2019 O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference remarked: "The best way to become a 10x developer is to teach nine other developers to do your job as well, not to get ten times better."

Technology industry thought leader CEO Avichal Garg in the article Focus on building 10x teams, not on hiring 10x developers states: “The superstar is the team, not the individual... Software development, however, is more like rowing. It’s a team sport that requires skill and synchronisation. This applies at all scales. ”

An organisation's approach to software development can benefit from better team dynamics, rather than reliability of a team built with 10x developers. Senior managers can guarantee the improved productivity of engineering teams by designing processes that will create “rock-star” teams.

How BlueOptima’s software development metric can help you build an efficient engineering team

Senior managers’ focus is now shifting away from hunting for 10x developers towards introducing best practice standards and targeted training for engineering teams. In order to achieve this process senior managers must focus on evaluating coding activities within the context in which work is delivered.

BlueOptima provides a SaaS analytics platform powered by objective static source code metrics. The platform allows organisations to understand the intellectual effort that software developers invest when delivering source code change for each revision of a file in a repository.

Historical revisions stored in version control systems are analysed using the core metric Actual Coding Effort (ACE), to produce an objective, internal benchmark of the intellectual effort delivered by software engineers, resulting in a value of Coding Effort. Time and motion studies, undertaken in both an academic and industry setting, have concluded that not more than 5 Coding Effort hours can consistently be delivered by a developer within a working day. It accounts for other work activities in a software developer’s day that does not involve coding.

BlueOptima can understand the direct correlation between context and the amount of Coding Effort that affects a developer’s productivity. Ultimately, this provides an organisation with insights to objectively understand a team's work output and improve the productivity of their software developers.

Why is Coding Effort better to help build an efficient-dynamic team?

It provides senior managers with the ability to understand software development objectively to:
Identify areas of high and low productivity within their teams and projects.
Spot opportunities to pair high performers with low performers to help improve their skills, training and experience.
See which individuals and teams are experiencing blockers.
Identify the best practices driving productivity in a team and use those practices to help other teams improve their capabilities.
Fairly compare effort invested by teams across different projects to make strategic changes.

The 10x developer concept is an outdated and impractical approach to improving productivity of teams and skill improvement of individual developers.

A “rock-star” team consisting of software developers who focus on skill improvement are better equipped at their craft to be able to identify valuable problems to solve for their organisations. The Head of Product Engineering at Redgate Jeff Foster writes, “Investing time in your craft (be it coding or design or project management) is a must, but just remember that your craft doesn’t exist in isolation and exists to serve a higher-goal.”

Consequently, it is far better for a software developer to become a 5x developer with Coding Effort as the main driver of quantifying success. It allows for transparency into the software development process for both senior managers and engineering teams.

Organisations fixate on “rock-star” developers hoping for higher returns on software investments. They concentrate on the ideal of “rock-star” developers instead of team collaboration; as a result, features are not delivered on time and under budget. This focus negatively impacts an organisation's software development culture.

Team collaboration is important to a culture, but most managers do not recognise the benefit it has on knowledge sharing. A 2020 survey by Coding San reported that 24% of developers find it challenging to share knowledge, admittedly only 15% of managers recognised this challenge faced by developers.

To succeed, senior managers must shift focus towards creating the work conditions that promote collaboration. In turn this enhances communication, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

To form industry-leading software development teams who are empowered to efficiently deliver, it is necessary to establish a development operation that creates 5x software developers. This formula will improve time to market and software development ROI.

Original article can be found here:
https://www.blueoptima.com/blog/the-10x-developer-myth

Software Developer Training: How On-The-Job Training Can Improve Software Developer Skills

BlueOptima — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 11:58:03 +0000

To get more out of software development, organisations must create a continuous learning culture with practical on-the-job training.

Industry leaders are gaining competitive advantage by investing more in learning and development (L&D), according to a UK L&D report, 94% of companies recognise it is critical to success. This intentional prioritisation of L&D is critical to keep up with technology innovation. An investment in a continuous learning culture better adapts an organisation’s software development for continuous delivery.

The need for software developers to keep up with industry knowledge has never been more important, new technologies improve the productivity of software development teams. It is crucial that software development organisations have an in-depth understanding of technologies and be adaptable to rapid industry change.

Senior technology leaders are providing software engineering teams with a variety of ways to learn when at work. A research report by Training Industry Inc. found that a blended approach to learning modes (e.g. coaching, e-learning and on-the-job training) has a useful impact on their learning.

To meet the skill needs of software developers; there must be more emphasis on improving problem-solving skills and converting theoretical knowledge into practical application. This article discusses why on-the-job training is a better solution to foster continuous learning in an organisation’s software development culture.

Online Learning Platforms Are Not situational To A Software Developers Work Environment

Technology-enabled approaches to learning are a flexible approach to support the knowledge and skills development of software developers. It fills the need for immediate learning and professional development. But, technical online learning platforms use traditional learning techniques which are not the most effective method to improve the current knowledge and skills of software developers.

Online learning platforms such as PluralSight, Udemy, CodeCademy, Skillsoft, Simplilearn, and Coursera provide mobile educational content capabilities. The courses offered to software developers use blended learning techniques, which incorporates traditional classroom settings within an e-learning environment.

For example, technology skills platform PluralSight allows software developers to select topics related to improving their current knowledge and skill needs. This form of online training is said to help developers focus on what will benefit their technical skills. But developers have to anticipate specific areas to pursue within the learning platform’s library.

This gap in relevant educational content can negatively impact a developer’s productivity since the educational content is not situational to their software development work environment. Situated learning environments place learners in authentic learning situations and actively immerses them in an activity that uses their problem-solving skills. Software developers need proficient access to knowledge that can immediately benefit their workflow.

On-the-job training is delivered while an individual is performing tasks related to their particular profession. This approach is a vital form of professional growth; furthermore, 58% of developers surveyed by HackerRank agree and want opportunities to learn new technical skills on the job.

Online learning platforms are thought to provide situated learning capabilities; however, they use traditional learning settings that require an instructor and out of context experience.

To improve the knowledge and skills of software developers, managers must focus on learning methods that engage a developer’s problem-solving abilities.

Engaging A Developer’s Problem-Solving Skills

Technical online learning platforms use traditional learning techniques that require the processing of information and retention of knowledge. This form of training does not allow for immediate practical application of the knowledge acquired; as a result, knowledge retention is lower. In an article by Harvard Business Review on Where Companies Go Wrong with (L&D), admittedly only 12% of employees apply the new skills learned in L&D programs to their job departments workflow.

On-the-job learning uses knowledge as a tool to facilitate problem-solving and knowledge sharing. It is a better use of online educational content. This form of training is directly incorporated into practice and encourages collaborative learning within software engineering teams’ workflow.

Software development is first about problem-solving, and second about writing code. Senior technology leaders who prioritise problem-solving skills will drive collaborative problem solving within engineering teams. A 2018 survey by HackerRank reported that 95% of industry leaders recognise problem-solving skills is more important when recruiting developer talent. A further 59% agree it is more important than programming language efficiency.

This method can be customised to meet the specific needs of individual developers. This tailored advantage gives managers transparency into what individuals are learning and how it aligns with organisational goals.

To succeed, senior managers must create conditions for continuous learning with more importance placed on collaboration and open communication.

How To Create The Conditions For Continuous Learning

BlueOptima’s How-To-Fix 2.0 (HTF 2.0) feature promotes knowledge retention and the immediate use of the knowledge gained. HTF 2.0 provides knowledge specific to problems identified in the files being worked on by the developers.

If developers are not provided with a practical approach to improve their knowledge it can negatively impact the codebase they are working on by making it less maintainable; as a result, they waste time searching for a solution.

This is how HTF 2.0 can benefit the creation of a continuous learning culture with effective on-the-job training:

1) Promotes Self-Learning

HTF 2.0 promotes self-learning by understanding what is the root cause of the software developer’s mistake and how to fix it. It provides tailored and relevant links on information to teach developers how to fix specific problems identified in the files. Developers get to learn from tailored educational content and immediately apply it.

The knowledge is received in bite-sized chunks and folds into their workflow. Studies have shown that acquiring knowledge in bite-sized chunks leads to better retention and use of knowledge gained. This form of learning can quickly close a skills gap, according to the Journal of Applied Psychology the transfer of learning to the desk is 17% more efficient.

2) Improves the Code Review Process

The quality of the code review process is benefited with consistency and adherence to software development best practices. Therefore, developers code contributions are cleaner and of higher quality before the code review process.

3) Knowledge Sharing Within Teams

Software developers are provided with chances to collaborate and seek help from senior engineers. HTF 2.0 can identify mentoring opportunities within an organisation by recommending other software developers that have successfully solved similar issues in the past.

Organisations that encourage mentoring can benefit from an increase in productivity. According to Mentorloop, industry leaders are using mentoring as a competitive advantage; reportedly, 71% of Fortune 500 companies offer mentoring programs to their employees. The guidance of senior developers provides junior developers with the opportunity for hands-on learning. It is an effective and fast way to improve their problem-solving skills and retain knowledge gained.

Succeeding At Fostering A Continuous Learning Culture

Online software development training courses are accessible for learning about new trending technology stacks and the latest best practices. They are better used to help develop new skills such as learning a new coding language.

HOW-TO-FIX 2.0 helps make developers better at their craft. It concentrates on improving the current knowledge and capabilities of software developers. This strengthens collaboration within engineering teams and drives chances for continuous improvement.

HTF2.0 is free with a subscription to BlueOptima’s Developer Analytics platform. Discover how to keep your organisation’s software development adapt for continuous delivery.

The original article can be found here: https://www.blueoptima.com/blog/software-developer-training