How to design and improve your software development workflow

Software development workflows are structured approaches to developing, testing, and deploying software. Sometimes, these are designed, but often, teams arrive at them organically, evolving them in response to different problems over time.  If your team struggles with misaligned expectations, missed deadlines, and wasted resources, you should consider a deliberate approach to inspecting and improving your workflow. With an appropriately effective process, your team will see streamlined communications, improved quality assurance pipelines, and decreased developer burnout.

We'll break down the software development workflow so you can better understand how your team can invest in efficiency. Along the way, we'll discuss development methodologies, approach strategies, and tackling common challenges. 

Plus, we'll explore how using software development analytics tools like Pluralsight Flow within your workflow can empower your team to make meaningful decisions. The folks at Capita utilized Flow to help optimize their operation and make better decisions in the process. They saw a 58% reduction in time to merge and a 36% reduction in PR time to the first comment.

Table of contents:

• What is a software development workflow?
• The requirements of any development workflow
• 7 Established software development methodologies
• Software development workflow challenges
• Strategies for improving your software development lifecycle
• FAQ

A software development workflow is a set of processes that enable software engineers and developers to move more efficiently through the various requirements of a development process. Team leaders implementing such practices are more likely to benefit from an organized and accountable flow for producing higher-quality software.

In earlier stages, creating a software development workflow involves collecting information, understanding customer needs, and roughly detailing your project planning. As the project advances, your workflow can be iterated and improved as developers cultivate a better understanding of how to improve their approach through the testing, deployment, and maintenance of the code.

Having the appropriate tools, like Flow, for measuring your workflow is vital to the software development process. Collecting and understanding development data is essential to providing a holistic view of your team's progress and efficiency.

Every software development workflow relies on a structured set of actions your team must follow during development. We'll review the five essential requirements of any development process, providing clear objectives and activities for you and your team. In creating your process, clarity in how you meet these requirements will give you a greater sense of team collaboration, purpose, and overall efficiency and minimize wasted resources.

The most important part of designing a development workflow is understanding development requirements. This seems obvious, but without a solid comprehension of your customer needs and how to work towards them, your team may miss the mark and deliver an incomplete or misdirected product. Prevent this possibility by identifying the project's stakeholders and gathering requirements.

Developers can host one-on-one interviews with stakeholders to understand their needs. Alternatively, teams can organize workshops with multiple stakeholders or send surveys or questionnaires. Once they've collected the necessary information, the team can condense it into actionable items, such as diagrams or user stories from templates, and start talking about how to work together on those stories effectively.

With a good enough understanding of the software's requirements, it's time to think about your system's architecture and interface. These designs - architecture and UI alike - will typically aspire to a seamless, efficient experience that allows for robust scalability. Developers can choose an architectural style, such as monolithic or microservices, based on application requirements and limitations, and each of these choices will inform how your development workflow should take shape 

Creating visual diagrams of how you want your team to work together—the same way you would your systems architecture and UI—can dramatically improve communication and understanding throughout your team. When everyone understands everyone else’s responsibilities, it’s easy to keep a team on track.

With a concrete understanding of the software's requirements, architecture, and interface, your team can start planning the development process itself. Again, in most teams, these decisions have sprung up organically over time, but it is worth stepping back and deliberately reconsidering them. Set coding standards to ensure consistency and maintainability throughout your codebase, schedule code reviews to catch bugs, or address potential issues early, all of these are necessary for a high-performing team.

Leveraging continuous integration (CI) tools and automated regression testing within your workflow can help automate code changes and empower your team to work more efficiently. We recommend mandating that tests be included whenever developers submit code to ensure new submissions don't reintroduce old bugs to the codebase. This gives your development workflow a “one-way quality ratchet,” guaranteeing your product’s overall quality isn’t regressing.

If you're questioning the efficiency of your coding process, a tool like Pluralsight Flow can provide additional context. Analyze software engineering metrics, including coding days, commits per day, new work, and productive throughput, to identify potential areas for improvement.

Quality assurance (QA) testing ensures your code operates correctly. QA helps your team meet set requirements, but it also requires making time in your processes.  Requirements for unit testing to verify the functionality of components and integration testing to ensure modules and services work as expected seem expensive and sometimes tedious, but the cost of not having them is invariably many times higher.

Building robust testing and QA efforts into your process in collaboration with your customers also guarantees that progress toward their final acceptance criteria is easily visible and proven.

As well, by instituting robust QA in your processes from the beginning, QA testing can continue even after your software ships. Continuously collecting feedback from users to help improve your software development workflow and employing user feedback forms, bug reports, and self-reporting metrics after delivery are all great ways to stay on top of your application and create the best software possible. And the best possible relationship with your clients.

At some point, as frequently as possible, you need to ship. This is the stage where your software is ready to be shared with the world. Creating a comprehensive deployment plan, which outlines the timeline and provides crucial information about potential system downtime, is part of it, of course - but in designing your engineering workflow, you should never lose track of the fact that you’re planning to ship, and shipping is a process you also need to build and test, that needs vision, leadership, and accountability.

Choosing a deployment strategy is a negotiation between your customers, engineers, and leadership. Select the one that best aligns with your team's needs and capabilities. Some of the most popular strategies include:

• Blue-green deployment: Minimize downtime with two identical environments—one handling live traffic while the other is updated.
• Canary deployment: Limit the initial release by rolling out new software to only a few users before going full-scale.
• Rolling deployment: Similar to canary development, rolling deployment involves performing a gradual rollout, deploying in subsets of servers and instances.

In designing our software development methodology, we can take inspiration from the well-established methodologies of the field.  Most teams will arrive at an approach that’s relatively structured, much like an existing model, as far as planning, organizing, and managing development is concerned. Having a name for these methodologies can also help developers effectively communicate the most complex aspects of software development and encourage well-structured collaboration. 

What’s best for you? Agile vs. waterfall or something else? Let’s find out.

The waterfall model is best for projects with well-defined requirements that will likely stay the same throughout the development lifecycle. Conceived as a linear approach, developers must complete each phase before moving on to the next, creating a rigid structure focusing on progression that makes project management and tracking easier.

The model focuses on defining detailed requirements at the start of the project to establish an explicit focus and clear documentation for each phase. Downsides to the waterfall model include a structure that makes changes problematic and a late testing phase that makes it challenging for developers to fix bugs early.

The Agile model is one of the most popular development approaches and works well in environments where requirements may change over time. Agile developers focus on flexibility while relying heavily on team collaboration and user feedback. Breaking development into small tasks makes it easier for developers to reassess requirements as needed due to market changes and responses.

Users are known for being involved throughout Agile to ensure the end products meet their expectations and needs. However, due to the flexible nature of the model, it can be challenging to predict timelines and budgets accurately. Scope creep can also quickly become an issue without proper management or analytical tools.

If the Agile model feels like a good fit for your development process, a tool like Pluralsight Flow can be helpful in understanding how your team collaborates. It can reveal metrics like the time it takes to merge from when a developer opens a pull request and how your team interacts with code and each other.

The spiral model focuses heavily on risk analysis and best suits extensive, complex projects involving high risk. Developers following the spiral model repeat steps to ensure quality and requirement adherence. This model can be more costly due to its iterative cycles, but its approach can be essential in critical fields.

High-quality development is a significant upside to the spiral model, but its complexity can be challenging to implement. The spiral model also requires more experienced managers and developers to manage risk analysis and prototyping properly. Teams invested in secure development models may also want to consider SecDevOps, a combination of security practices and DevOps development.

The DevOps model aims to unify two practices: software development (Dev) and software operations (Ops). It's best in environments where deployment and operations teams must closely collaborate while emphasizing automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Analysis is also critical to the practice, and DevOps metrics can be employed to understand performance.

Due to its greater efficiency, the DevOps model can result in a faster time to market via automated pipelines, such as within a CI/CD practice. Continuous testing also helps teams create higher-quality software and more reliable systems. Keep in mind that DevOps implementation requires a significant cultural shift, so team leaders must be prepared to assist all stakeholders with the change.

Rapid application development (RAD) is a quick approach adaptable to changes; it's excellent in prototyping environments where requirements may be quickly altered. RAD is best suited for projects requiring prompt delivery or requiring developers to integrate user feedback swiftly.

Negative aspects of the RAD model include the potential for scope creep due to continuous changes and limited scalability that may make it unsuitable for large, complex systems. All team members must be involved regularly to make RAD a feasible approach.

It's not uncommon for every software development workflow to face unforeseen challenges. A team's efficiency is determined by how well it accepts the challenge and improves its processes. The good news? Whether it's scope creep or security problems, there are solutions for all development problems.

Uncertain project requirements are an issue for any development team. Understanding all requirements is the first step in the software development workflow. Without direction, your team will struggle to know what they're working toward and whether they've accomplished their goals. 

Solution: Engage stakeholders early in your workflow to gather all requirements and consider Agile methodologies in environments where requirements are continuously changing.

Inadequate testing and debugging will lead to more error-prone software, creating a worse user experience. It can also be more costly for your team to address big fixes after deployment, introducing additional complexities (aka less efficiency) within the development process.

Solution: Ensure your team has a detailed QA testing phase in its software development workflow, potentially utilizing automated testing solutions.

If your project started with a specific scope and has quickly grown into a mountain, you're experiencing a common problem called scope creep. In many situations, scope creep is caused by teams not clearly defining information at the start of the project. It may be beneficial to create a formal change control process so any changes to scope must first be evaluated and approved.

Tools like Pluralsight Flow can help teams track their scope and see how much has been added since the project began. By empowering your team with powerful insights, you can prevent the scope from sneaking up on them.

Solution: Ensure the beginning of your software development workflow clearly defines the scope and requirements of your project.

When resource forecasting is inaccurate, your team may not have enough resources to complete a project. This problem may surface as insufficient time, developers, money, or system resources.

Solution: Analyze past historical data to help determine available resources while allowing a buffer for unpredictable situations or modifications.

A lackluster security process is a dangerous challenge that can lead to compromises in your software and systems. Repeated security concerns can quickly decrease consumer trust and diminish loyalty. 

Solution: Regularly review your QA testing process and implement additional security audits and assessments throughout your workflow.

Your lifecycle’s effectiveness depends on how closely your team adheres to processes and how well you implement strategies to optimize it. Poor communication can lead to misaligned goals and overlooked requirements, while overlapping responsibilities can usher in decreased efficiency and misconceived accountability. Here's how to keep things running smoothly.

Ensuring your team has clearly defined roles and responsibilities is critical. When a team doesn't know who performs what tasks, it quickly leads to overlaps and inefficiencies. To help with clear communication, create and share a document listing every individual's role, responsibilities, and expectations.

The software development lifecycle is detailed, and automated tools can help increase overall efficiency for a more significant ROI. Use analytical tools like Pluralsight Flow to gain detailed insight into your development team so you can reduce cycle time, increase daily commits, and establish a more efficient development workflow.

The latest addition to the developer's toolbox has been the inclusion of artificial intelligence (AI) in development. Pluralsight Flow's Director of Software Engineering Chad Scribner explained how his team has been using such tools to keep code compliant while acknowledging that human judgment is still key:

“Our most impactful experiences with AI have centered around autocompletion within IDEs and text editors. It has assisted in keeping our code DRY, standards compliant, and in other ways that require a shallow understanding that can be automated. Until improvements are made, human judgment and activity will continue in higher-level areas.”

Developers created the Agile methodology to improve team flexibility and collaboration. By switching to an Agile development approach, teams are better equipped to respond quickly to project changes and achieve faster delivery times. 

With Agile development, there are even multiple frameworks to select from, including Scrum and SAFe. The method's emphasis on cooperation also leads to a better understanding of goals and teamwork through practices like the daily standup meeting.

Creating user stories can help keep your team focused and aligned on project requirements. By creating stories, developers can showcase user needs and expectations non-technically. This approach facilitates clear communication with every stakeholder and allows for better scope management. The review and refinement process also encourages improvement after deployment.

Automating repetitive operations in your development lifecycle reduces the need for manual labor. Using automation tools, your team can focus more on complex issues that need their attention. Automation also helps reduce overall mistakes and inconsistencies due to human error, leading to cost savings.

By integrating testing into every facet of the development lifecycle, such as code reviews, your team can significantly increase overall software quality. Early testing allows for detecting potential issues, reducing some fixes' overall cost and complexity. Through proactive testing, development teams can also help mitigate risks, creating more stable, faster-to-market software.

Once your team has deployed software, it's critical to carefully and continuously assess ongoing performance. By remaining aware of your product's operation once live, more proactive problem-solving is possible. Teams can also better anticipate scalability needs and improve the overall user experience through received feedback and analytics.

Your development team can't properly align with user needs and expectations unless accessible feedback channels are available. To foster open communication, ensure all project stakeholders, users, and testers can submit feedback and requests with minimal obstacles. Developers can deliver a more robust product through iterative improvement and continuous learning.

Scribner shared how keeping a channel of open communication allows his teams to share feedback when working to keep their codebase clean:

"We strive to provide an environment in which developers feel safe to call out messy or problematic code and get it on a list. Then, we create processes to get the items on those lists prioritized and fixed. It might sometimes take longer than desired, but we demonstrate that calling out an inefficient codebase will lead to that codebase being improved."

Scribner shared his team's approach to tackling technical debt—the concept of trading a simple solution today for additional complexity in the future. While avoiding technical debt is best, there are ways to decrease what has accrued.

"Up until very recently, our teams worked in eight-week cycles, with two of the weeks dedicated to activities such as paying down technical debt," he said. "The technical debt reduction was usually either related to work done in the previous six weeks or was a high priority for some other reason. There are downsides to this type of workflow, but it does ensure teams are always chipping away at technical debt before it gets stale."

You might still have questions about the software development workflow, seeking the best methods to improve your team's efficiency. Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions we've received about the software development workflow process.

The typical software development workflow comprises several phases that guide developers through creating, deploying, and maintaining software. The exact steps vary between methodologies but generally consist of the following:

1. Requirement gathering and analysis
2. Project and resource planning
   
3. Implementation (coding)
4. QA testing
5. Deployment and maintenance
   

Establish clear communication channels within your organization. Ensure your environment fosters transparency by promoting open sharing of ideas, concerns, and feedback. Continuously solicit feedback on your team's communication to help identify additional growth and improvement areas.

Scribner explained how his team uses communication tools to promote collaboration and efficiency:

“If we have a project spanning multiple sprints or one involving more than one team, we usually have a dedicated Slack channel in order to ensure efficient comms and not clutter primary channels. We can always fire up a quick Zoom meeting if we need to mob program to knock a problem out.”

Many tools are available to help your team with the software development workflow, such as Pluralsight Flow, which provides transformative insights into your team. By integrating with your existing development platforms, Flow can highlight your team's overall efficiency, including coding days, commits per day, and deployment frequency, showcasing potential areas for improvement.

Selecting the correct software development workflow can be challenging, but having the proper information can help you make an informed decision. Understand your project's requirements, available resources, and customer requirements. Next, evaluate potential workflow methodologies and consider how your team dynamics and culture would work to mesh with the approach.

When establishing project requirements, engaging stakeholders early and often to set clear goals is critical. You can ensure accuracy and relevance by validating and prioritizing your requirements. As you work with your team, creating clear and structured documentation will go a long way to ensure everyone is on the same track and understands the project’s goals.

As your team progresses through the software development workflow, having complete, unobstructed visibility is critical to an efficient process. Pluralsight Flow offers real-time data and analytics on your team's developer productivity.

Uncover bottlenecks and areas for enhancement in your workflow, including where inefficiencies have led to delays or where frequent reworks are a norm. By integrating with development tools like Git and Jira, Pluralsight Flow is your key to a more streamlined lifecycle.

Request a demo today to discover how Pluralsight Flow can lead to greater efficiency, including reduced cycle times, more daily commits, and less scope creep.