Velocity – the measurement of work done within a given time period – is a valuable metric for software development planning. What makes it so useful? Not only does measuring velocity give your development team greater adaptability to changing requirements – things like new functionality, enhancements, and improvements – it enables you to more easily predict delivery timelines and manage stakeholder expectations.
When you optimize and maintain development velocity, it can drive efficiencies and deliver cost savings, especially when you remove inefficiencies and bottlenecks from the development process. The secret to increasing and maintaining velocity? Monitoring and addressing the maintainability of your custom code to empower your developers to be more productive.
Measuring velocity in software development
In software development, velocity can be measured in a number of ways. Agile project management uses ‘story points’ to assign values to specific tasks based on variables such as the effort required, the complexity, the risk, and the experience of the team.
The size of the story depends on the task. For example, changing the color of a button is a very short story, whereas implementing a user sign-in screen is a much longer one. By defining the points value of each story, it’s possible to more accurately plan the work to be done in any given development sprint.
One of the keys to increasing and maintaining velocity in custom-coded software projects is to assess and monitor the quality of your codebase. Why? High-quality code is easier to maintain. Devs spend less time figuring out the problems, and more time on project delivery.
Increasing velocity via maintainability
Here are 5 ways to improve the maintainability of your source code and therefore increase the velocity of development:
1 Allocate time for debt reduction
Allocate a portion of each sprint specifically to tackling technical debt. This prevents it from piling up over time. Define a percentage of total development time dedicated to paying down technical debt, ensuring it’s actively managed.
2 Refactor code regularly
Regularly refactor code as part of day-to-day development, especially when working in areas that already have technical debt. Small, continuous improvements are easier to manage. Large-scale rewrites can be risky. Instead, refactor progressively, focusing on improving the most problematic areas.
3 Implement strong code reviews
Ensure that code reviews are thorough and enforce agreed-upon coding standards, such as consistent naming conventions and proper design patterns. Encourage team members to review each other’s code to catch potential technical debt early before it enters the main codebase.
4 Improve documentation
Maintain up-to-date documentation, particularly for complex areas of the code, to make it easier to understand and modify later. If temporary workarounds or shortcuts are introduced, document why they were necessary and how they can be properly addressed later.
5 Address the root causes of technical debt creation
Ensure solid architecture and design from the beginning to avoid shortcuts that lead to technical debt later on. Avoid cutting too many corners to meet deadlines. Instead, build realistic schedules that allow time for writing cleaner and more maintainable code.
Monitor technical quality and increase velocity
Measuring technical quality on a regular basis gives you the oversight needed to decrease technical debt and increase velocity. A cleaner, more maintainable codebase means developers can focus their effort on what matters most – building new features and functionality in response to the needs of the business.
BonCode’s consultancy-based platform for assessing and monitoring software quality surfaces huge volumes of data on the technical debt in your custom-coded systems, but it delivers the results in one easy-to-understand metric – a solution score. The value of this simplicity is that you can track, at a glance, trends in the velocity of software development over time.
Interested in increasing the velocity of custom-coded software development using our platform for assessing and monitoring quality? Let’s chat. Book a demo
