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The Most Effective Ways To Speed Up Your Development Process

Forbes Technology Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Forbes Technology Council

Quality development takes time.

But when you're short on that particular resource, having a few tricks to speed up the process can be invaluable. Even something as simple as defining your deliverables and sticking to them can help.

Clockwise from top left: Satyam Tyagi, Venkat Rangan, Marc Jensen, Jonathan Penny, Guillermo Ramos, Yusuf Simonson, Jim Walsh, Chris Kirby, Thomas Griffin. All photos courtesy of the individual members.

Below, nine tech executives from Forbes Technology Council offer their best tips for speeding up the development process when you're in a pinch.

1. Use Agile Processes With Customizations

Modify your definition of speed to delivering maximum business value early. The beauty of agile is that it starts delivering business value after the first sprint. It gives adaptability if priorities change with every sprint. It also reduces risk if there are design mistakes, and reduces the risk of the last integration cycle. It also provides continuous visibility to customers and sales so they know exactly where you are. – Satyam TyagiCertes Networks

2. Create Small Components and Small Teams

Agile methodology combined with many small components/micro-services and team organization around them leads to small, highly productive teams. Combined with a culture of unit tests, functional tests and continuous integration, this makes it possible to break down a big problem into smaller chunks and have each team run to aggressive milestones and schedules. – Venkat RanganClari Inc.

3. Challenge the Plan

At our company, we have an initial "Challenge Phase" that is designed to clarify scope and reduce risk in our projects. Often, the initial plan isn't ultimately what gets done for a given project, so we take the time to ensure that we clearly understand the problem and outline what success means before we start. This way the hours and time we spent truly contribute to the end result. – Marc JensenSpace150

4. Define Your Deliverables

The most important part of development is defining the deliverables and sticking to them. Changing deliverables and moving the goal line will delay the project, increase costs and kill team morale. Change requests and bug fixes are inevitable. However, if the change is not related to a bug or security hole, ship the code on time and make the change in a future sprint. – Jonathan PennyMyfootpath

5. Change Management

There are three things to consider: scope, resources and time. Changing any one of these will affect the other two. Increase scope without increasing resources and time goes up (the development process appears to slow). Decrease resources without decreasing scope and time goes up (the development process appears to slow). Effectively manage scope and resources, and the development process will not appear to slow. – Guillermo Ramos, Greatist

6. Hold Development Sprints

Development sprints, even inside the scope of a larger project, give your team the ability to achieve quick wins in what might otherwise be a painstakingly long development cycle. The benefit of quick wins and that feeling of gratification for your team cannot be understated: they spur, foster, motivate and ultimately culminate in more focused development on active and future projects. – Thomas GriffinOptinMonster

7. Minimize Scope Creep

The best way to speed up the development process is to minimize scope creep. Do this by breaking all solutions into smaller phases that allow the more critical elements to be addressed first and the more long-term requirements to wait for a lull in development. Incremental solutions satisfy the greatest number of stakeholders as quickly as possible without alienating any particular group. – Chris Kirby, Voices.com

8. Use a Lean Approach

Fast doesn't matter if you're building the wrong product. The key to moving quickly and effectively is to build your product in small increments, test with real users in real-life situations ASAP, and then adjust your direction based on their feedback and your data/observations. This "Lean" approach is fully compatible with Agile, Continuous Delivery and other modern software approaches. – Jim WalshGlobalLogic

9. Try Continuous Integration

Use Continuous Integration! This software will continuously run tests and deployments as code gets updated. This really tightens the cycle from changes to deployment, and ensures engineers are being really thoughtful of tests and verification. – Yusuf SimonsonThe Muse