Juggling innovation with day-to-day maintenance in a small software team can be challenging. Staying innovative & creative is key to ensuring your product or service stays ahead of the competition.
Here are six key points to ensure your software team can support & maintain your product and continue to innovate:
- Split development work into streams to achieve faster development speed. Team A works on new features & Team B gets bugs, fixes & improvements.
- Ensure your software delivery lifecycle is open and transparent using tools such as JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket (formerly Stash) and of course Crucible for peer review. Take it all the way to the product team by introducing road-mapping software like Aha! into the mix to guarantee consistent flow from concept to delivery.
- Promote good team practices such as version control, build & release automation, testing & good documentation, both in your comments, APIs and manuals.
- Ensure you (or your DevOps manager) communicates the constant changes in workload & customer priorities carefully with as little impact on the team as possible.
- Create an automated user-testing workflow that works with your build process to reduce the “end of sprint” impact on your team. This creates a third testing stream which runs alongside your development streams.
- Talk to sales & operations teams and ensure your systems talk to each other too! Avoid duplication of work and get your specifications into one place.
