Developer Collaboration: 10 Tips to Make App Development More Efficient

by Darryl K. Taft

The average employee receives more than 300 emails weekly, checks his/her email three-dozen times per hour, and spends 16 minutes refocusing after dealing with email. Teams can be more organized and productive by centralizing information in one location, rather than burying it in email or spreading it across multiple applications. Information that is stored in a structured hierarchy is easy to navigate and search. Collaboration platforms such as Atlassian Confluence unite content creation and shared information with everyone in an organization, making it easy to find information and get work done.

Working in isolation is old-fashioned. Product requirements are living documents that regularly change as team members iterate on their original idea, and keeping track of these changes can quickly become complicated. Start the development process by defining requirements in a content collaboration platform so they can be shared with your team for immediate feedback. By storing all discussions and changes in one place, information is easy to discover and teams can keep moving product forward.

Everyone is familiar with social features like @mentions and “Likes” from Facebook and Twitter. These features have made their way into enterprise software, and they’re here to stay. @mentions are an easy way to pull teammates into discussions and “Likes” are a lightweight way to validate feedback and express approval.

Conversations in real time are ideal, but what if the person you’re trying to reach isn’t sitting next to you? Instant messaging makes it easy to connect with colleagues whether they’re across the office, town or the globe. Added functionality such as secure group and 1:1 chat, persistent and searchable chat history, and @mentions with mobile push notifications (available in chat services like HipChat) make modern messaging effective for business use.

Teams often kick off sprint or development cycles with a meeting, but a sad fact is that the average employee spends 31 hours in unproductive meetings each month. Don’t add to this statistic. Crowd-source a clear agenda on a single page, outline goals for your meeting and share it with participants ahead of time. Record notes during the meeting and make progress by assigning action items. Or eliminate meetings altogether by posting updates on a meeting notes page where each person can contribute when able.

Agile development has exploded in popularity as a best practice for planning and tracking work and delivering value. Turn requirements into stories on your backlog and track their completion on a rapid board, whether with sticky notes on a whiteboard or issues on a Scrum board using issue management software like JIRA and JIRA Agile. It will keep everyone in the know about who is responsible for what and the status of work.

True collaboration goes deeper than text conversations, especially for developers. Sharing files and documents is crucial, but doing so in email can be slow, and often difficult to find and organize. The average knowledge worker receives 53 emails with attachments every day. Share files and documents in real time with an instant messaging solution that offers persistent and saved chat rooms where you can easily find them again later.

As development teams become increasingly distributed across time zones, geographies, applications and devices, collaboration can become more difficult. Stay connected with chat services that offer native apps to provide a seamless experience across varying operating systems and devices. Employees can chat, share files and more from their mobile phone, laptop or the Web without interruption when using a chat solution like HipChat.

The best teams learn from mistakes and make improvements on their next sprint or project. Running collaborative retrospectives and assigning action items is key to continuous improvement. Make a best practice the easiest practice by creating and storing retrospectives in a central collaboration platform, such as Confluence, where they can be easily accessed and referenced at any time.

Everyone uses a variety of products to develop software. So having products that can talk to each other through integration makes the process much easier. For example, receive automatic notifications in chat when a test fails or a new issue is opened. Integrations that link collaboration products make it easier for teams and outside stakeholders to stay informed and up to date.