Creating and running high-performance engineering teams

1. Creating and Running High-Performance Engineering Teams

2. Introduction: There is a German proverb that says, “To aim is not enough, you must hit!” One might aim for excellence, but hitting the target is a whole another story.  Traditionally, teams measure their performance against the metric of speed. As a matter of fact, speed is one of the key factors causing the widespread adoption of Agile and DevOps. Gargantuan projects run on waterfall used to stretch for years, often going over budget and failing to deliver on time. Therefore, to improve performance and to resolve these issues, speed or velocity emerged as the obvious non-functional requirement. The faster the releases are done, the better the performance, right? Well, wrong!  Often, the need for speed seems to dominate the essentiality of quality in a software. The software development teams compromise with the overall quality of the release only to match the determined criteria for speed. Doing releases in the desired timeframe might appear to be a qualified metric for performance assessment, but in reality, it is highly superficial. If the quality is not up to the expectations, it will create negative customer experiences and consequently, impacts business reputation. Speed could be an appropriate metric to measure maturity but falls short when it comes to determining the value it offers to the end–users. 

3. Forrester, in their latest report on “Predictions 2020: DevOps”, emphasized that business value will overtake velocity as the preferred metric among the DevOps teams. Now, it will no longer be about how fast you are delivering. It will be about how well you are delivering. The analyst predicts, “DevOps teams will increasingly prefer outside-in metrics such as improved sales, revenue, client retention, and customer satisfaction to the inside-out measure of velocity.” Such a critical shift awakens, rather necessitates embracing a performance engineering approach to ensure greater value to all the stakeholders. For creating high-performance software applications, high–performance engineering teams are required. What is a high-performance engineering team? Professor Leigh Thompson defines a team as “a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, knowledge, and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal.“  The performance engineering approach in software development shifts the focus on continuous quality. Performance engineering teams test the software applications proactively and pre-emptively. They make sure that a software application performs high against the non-functional requirements. 

4. There are some differentiating and defining characteristics which separate a general team from a high-performing team:  • Trust and accountability: High-performance teams are built on a culture of trust and accountability, where every member can openly express their ideas.  • Resilient mindsets: Such teams know how to navigate around changes efficiently.  • Clear and shared vision: The whole team share a common vision and work toward a common goal.  • Smooth communication: A high-performing team ensure that information is communicated timely and clearly to every member  • Higher engagement:Each member shows active participation while ensuring that everyone in the team is involved.  • Unambiguous metrics:High-performance teams have clear metrics set for them. This helps them understand whether or not they are going in the right direction.  • Early conflict resolution: A team delivering high performance does not let bad conflicts brew among them. They welcome disagreements and resolve conflicts as soon as they occur.  • Constructive feedback: Constructive criticism is encouraged and used to improve their existing performance.  • Read Full Blog at: https://www.cigniti.com/blog/high-performance-engineering-teams-approach/