How to Use Progressive Deployment to Address Dev Team Burnout

Software development teams experience high levels of burnout. Progressive delivery can address stress, workload, and other factors that alleviate burnout and result in improved software quality and speed of delivery.

That was the result of a survey 83% of DevOps professionals report feeling burned out, a worrying statistic. The pressure on software development teams is higher than ever as more companies move to the cloud and customers embrace SaaS offerings, driving demand for new features and faster troubleshooting.

Product completeness, quality and stability drive customer satisfaction, and the responsibility to meet these needs rests on the shoulders of the development team. Reducing redundancy and tedium in the development cycle will reduce developer workloads and result in higher quality products and happier customers and employees. The introduction of automated processes and update tools helps reduce developer stress and accelerate the speed of software delivery. In particular, Progressive Deployment, the next generation of Continuous Deployment (CD), can be the solution for managing your team’s workflow so they can focus on what they really want to do – write great code using the GitOps approach, it knows and loves, and seamlessly deploying the resulting software.

Let’s examine the causes of burnout in development teams and how team managers can proactively address these issues through process improvements.

The requirements for development teams

The development teams’ feelings of exhaustion are understandable. Teams are under intense pressure to accelerate delivery speeds while maintaining or improving software quality and reliability. The work of developing and updating a software application is mentally exhausting and pressure-generating, especially with the expectation of continuous product delivery. Add in changing requirements and new customer demands, and you can begin to understand why burnout has increased.

The pandemic only added to the pressure as teams also had to deal with new remote work processes and manage their personal lives during uncertain times. In summary, the following burdens for development teams can be mentioned:

• Increased workload as companies move to the cloud
• Increased customer demand for new features and bug fixes delivered quickly and with high quality
• Pressure to maintain software reliability and service stability and avoid service outages. According to an IT intelligence consultancy reportA single hour of downtime costs organizations between $100,000 and $5 million per hour

Trying to meet those expectations with inadequate processes and tools creates stress and frustration. Manually performing repetitive tasks that could be automated increases the mental and physical stress on development teams and prevents developers from focusing on writing new code and solving known problems, which are the tasks they prefer to work on . Computer Weekly found that inefficient processes were the second highest cause of developer burnout. Manual processes also bring the possibility of human error, another time and energy waster that impacts overall quality and productivity.

See more: Developer burnout is real, here’s what to do about it

The Effects of Burnout

Burnout impairs performance, leading to a drop in team productivity and efficiency, and a decrease in the quality and speed of service delivery. The less efficient your team is, the more it affects your bottom line. McKinsey reports companies with higher release rates achieved Four to five times faster sales growth than companies with lower release rates. Organizations that fail to improve the software delivery cycle will continue to fall behind the competition.

Managers play a critical role in the productivity and engagement of their development teams. A common mistake managers make is to view the software creation process as a people problem rather than a process problem. Leaders who view it as a human problem attribute problems to team efforts and assign more work to improve performance. This tactic contributes to burnout and bad software. Process-oriented managers listen to the input of their employees, identify the source of the productivity bottleneck and fix it.

Developing and using the right performance metrics is a good place to start for managers to drive process improvements that ultimately lead to better products and more engaged development teams. The most common set of baseline metrics used by high-performance teams developing cloud-native applications are the four core DORA metrics:

• Deployment frequency: how often an organization is successfully released to production.
• Change Lead Time: The time it takes for a commitment to go into production.
• Change Error Rate: The percentage of deployments that cause an error in production.
• Time to Restore Service: The amount of time it takes to recover from a production outage.

Analyzing these metrics can help team leaders identify efficiency issues to begin improving workflow.

Progressive deployment as a solution

Progressive delivery is a new application release technique that allows organizations to manage the number of users exposed to new production code. It includes a variety of deployment strategies to gradually manage the “blast radius” of a production code change and modulate the size of the audience exposed to the code in a controlled manner. Automated continuous deployment solutions allow developers or DevOps engineers to simply push a button to activate deployment pipelines. The process then performs the mundane but complicated tasks required to reliably deploy code, eliminating unnecessary human intervention that often leads to human error.

Progressive delivery pushes updates to a select subset of users to collect data about the health of the software. If everything goes right, the new features will be delivered more and more widely. If the system encounters a problem during deployment, it can automatically revert the software to a previously determined version. Progressive delivery improves the feedback loop between developers and operations teams, ensures seamless delivery, improves the quality of service delivery, and minimizes human error and downtime.

The process enables developers and DevOps engineers to quickly troubleshoot deployment issues while maintaining quality of service for their customers. As a result, developers have more time to do what they love and were hired to do – write great code. The reduced workload gives teams time to get all their work done, reducing the likelihood of burnout by 70%, according to Gallup. DevOps professionals also feel more successful when they complete high-level projects without mundane tasks taking time. According to Psychology Today, performance is a motivator and an antidote to burnout.

Get support for progressive deployment solutions

How do you get management to improve tools and invest in automation? It starts with developing metrics. Because reliable delivery is so closely tied to generating revenue and meeting customer service agreements, DevOps teams can easily use deployment performance metrics to build a strong business case for improving development velocity and code reliability through progressive delivery. Any CFO worth their salt can calculate the cost of lost revenue or service level agreement penalties due to service downtime. Developers and/or DevOps engineers can experiment on a small scale with tools that support progressive delivery to begin measuring improvements and justifying the organization’s adoption of the necessary processes and tools.

Tools and processes have a significant impact on job satisfaction and quality of work for developers and DevOps professionals. Progressive delivery addresses flaws in processes by eliminating tedious tasks, streamlining delivery, building in higher-quality updates, and providing your customers with a better experience. The solution reduces workload, makes troubleshooting easier, and allows teams to focus on the work they love, keeping them engaged and motivated. Engaged employees create better products and faster cycle times, resulting in happier customers and happier employees.

Have you managed burnout better with progressive delivery? Tell us how next Facebook, Twitterand LinkedIn. We would like to know!

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