Tools that foster collaboration and information sharing throughout the software development process are becoming ever more important as enterprises move towards a DevOps culture. With a majority of developers considering chat and collaboration tools to be essential to their jobs, teams that rely on meetings in person may get left behind.
Our Global Developer Report explores how developers’ methods are changing, and how businesses can adapt to get the best out of their development teams. More than half of our respondents identified as developer or engineer, giving us insight into what matters to developers, how they work and what tools they choose. To see what our research revealed, you can download the full report to learn more about what today’s developers want.
Why collaboration matters
More and more enterprises are adopting DevOps to streamline their software development lifecycle. DevOps practices emphasise integration and collaboration between teams and sharing responsibility for the outcome, which means working together and keeping each other in the loop throughout the entire software development lifecycle. This change in approach necessitates a change in communication style as well.
By updating each other early and often, you can collect feedback regularly and integrate suggestions throughout the process. Including your non-technical team members in the conversation means they can get to work on promoting your next release or gathering feedback from customers, supporting your software development teams.
Why collaboration tools are important
As the build/ship/learn cycle speeds up, the team will naturally be working together throughout more of the cycle because they can and need to stay involved… and this benefits everyone. Enterprise teams need tools that can mirror their new cross-functional way of working, acknowledging that while the new enterprise team is distributed, they are more collaborative than ever before.
To keep everyone in the loop, especially with distributed, asynchronous teams, tools and features that enable closer collaboration within and across teams are essential. With 66 percent of developers preferring to be contacted via email or IM instead of in person, chat and other integrated collaboration tools help to keep the lines of communication open and ensure everyone has a clear view of where a project is at. The outcome is a more streamlined software development process, and a faster time to market with a better product.
Download our Global Developer Report to learn more about which tools are favored by developers today.
Image: “Message board” by MIKI Yoshihito is licensed under CC BY 2.0
