Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering

by Caitlin Sadowski

While each best-of-breed tool may enable productive work, the information flow between teams is impeded as information must be manually re-entered into a tool used by another team or moved in some other form, such as via a spreadsheet or an e-mail. Information can also fail to flow, causing difficulties in the development, such as errors when a given team may not have access to needed information. With the increasing agility and need for speed of delivery in software development, a lack of automation of information flow between teams is a major impediment. A Forester survey in 2015 identified that gaps in the process of integrating tools had become the number-one source of failure and cost overruns of efforts to modernize the software lifecycle in organizations. The impact on the productivity of teams due to friction in the flow of information between teams leads to a decrease in team productivity.