The software development process is at the heart of every development project and its impact is often more important than many people realize. The development process dictated everything about a project, how long it takes, how successful it is, and how much it costs. Auditing that process can reveal things that your company does not know about itself. In the end, that audit can help you change and improve your development practices. In this article, we discuss how software development process audits lead to better development.
Identify Waste
Waste comes in many forms, but all of them hurt software development companies. Conducting a software development process audit can identify potential waste in your existing processes. Time waste, in particular, is a difficult problem to address. The audit process does more than just assess the time waste, it can also help you pinpoint what is leading to that time waste.
Grade Team Members
For the audit to be successful, every member of the IT team must be analyzed. Every member contributes to the team in different ways and some more than others. When tough decisions need to be made about who works on which part or who holds the management responsibility for development, having an understanding of how each team member performs can be invaluable to your decisions. The audit takes a look at how every staff member contributes and lets you grade their performance so that you know who your strongest team members are and where you need to focus on training efforts.
Identify Quality-Impacting Processes
One way that an audit can help improve overall performance is by identifying processes that directly affect quality. Software development is often comprised of individual processes, such as planning, development sprints, QA testing, and other options. Any one of these processes can affect the outcome of the project.
For example, the planning process has a major impact on the rest of the project. Small changes to how you plan development can change how staff members work, and lead to drastically different results. By performing an audit, you’ll get to see which processes are impacting the final product the most, and how they are impacting production. This gives you the best chance of being able to correct issues and improving the overall quality of what your company produces.
Identify Strengths
It is just as important for a company to know its strengths as well as its weaknesses. For development teams, knowing where they are strong means that they can better allocate their time and resources. For example, allocating more time to areas where the team is strongest may not be an effective way to manage development. The team will speed through those areas, so the team should focus on the areas where it is weak. Devoting more time to those areas lets the team compensate and overcome those problems.
Agencies like KitelyTech that have development teams are great at conducting and using audits to their advantage. This is how many of the top agencies are able to achieve high-quality results on a consistent basis.
Original Sources:- https://www.businesstelegraph.co.uk/why-all-of-the-best-software-agencies-use-the-software-development-process-audit/
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