8 Ways to Streamline Your New Coding Project

New coding projects can be both financially and technically demanding. Streamlining your coding project is one way that you can overcome the challenges that come with building a new platform or app.

1. DevOps Automation

DevOps automation is the process of automating tasks throughout the DevOps lifecycle. The automation process makes it possible to complete many of these tasks without human interaction. This increases the speed of iterative updates. Automation eliminates the need for teams to complete repetitive manual tasks, which can shorten development cycles and make it possible to introduce more functionality by freeing up human resources to perform tasks that can not be automated.

2. Utilize Idea Management Tools

Developing new coding projects involves a lot of communication between coding teams and stakeholders. Without a centralized hub for that communication, the team can get slowed down by playing phone, text, or email tag. Idea management tools provide a platform to gather together opinions and feedback through whiteboards, built-in messaging, mind-map creation, and other tools. 

3. Keep Your Minimum Viable Products Basic

Testing your concept before you move into the product development phase is a critical step. When developing a minimum viable product for testing it is important to keep the design basic. Your MVP should have only the key functionality with no redundant features. The interface should be simple and usable. 

However, the MVP still needs to be functional. Don’t leave out key features. The MVP should be as close to the final product as possible. Pay close attention to the feedback you get from testers. Use big data and intelligence tools to gather and incorporate test data into your bigger picture to help create a data-driven decision model for your project.

4. Find the Root of Process Breakdowns

Bottlenecks happen in every project. Look for the root cause of the problem, instead of focusing on clearing the bottleneck. This way you can prevent future bottlenecks from happening.

5. Create and Use Component Libraries

Reusing as much of your codebase as you can speeds up your development process. Building a code library makes it easier to eliminate the redundant effort and helps ensure that the entire team uses the same set of best practices. Alternatively, you can download an existing code library.

6. Don’t Try to Build For Every Platform

Choose the two to three most popular platforms with your users instead of trying to develop your project for every possible platform. It is better to release the best possible version on fewer platforms than to spread your resources too thin and release a bunch of mediocre versions on platforms your users may not even use.

7. Streamline Your Testing

Keep your test suites small. Smaller test suites can be reused, which makes it possible for quality assurance testers to adapt them to test new features. Integrate your QA department with your development team. Your testers should use the same project management methodologies and tools as your development team. This makes it easier for the teams to communicate and integrate their schedules. Make sure you are tracking the correct metrics. Choose the metrics that provide you with the widest view of product performance.

8. Streamline Release and Maintenance

Your work isn’t over when you release your project. You need to provide bug fixes, patches, and other support. Prioritize issues so that your team focuses on the most problematic bugs first. You can use tracking tools, such as Bugzilla, to help with this step. Work from real-time updates so that you aren’t fixing problems that aren’t an issue anymore. Focus on the needs of end-users and release frequent updates. Proactively notify users about any system downtimes or technical problems.

Conclusion 

Streamlining your coding projects can help your team become more efficient. It removes frustration from your development process, helps you hit project deadlines, and makes it possible to shorten development cycles while also including more features. The more streamlined your coding process is, the better your product will be for your users.