7 Ways to Improve Your Web Development Team’s Productivity

Do you witness your web development team facing a productivity block? Are the extended development timelines increasing your overall development cost?

Perhaps lack in development productivity rings a bell for every other web development company, client, or project manager.

Every minute of delay in the development timeline adds a few dollars worth of project cost. That said, it is time to heal any kind of productivity ailments your team faces.

So, let’s face it, whether it is your in-house or offshore development team, you need to implement the right productivity hacks to reduce project timelines and development costs.

Thus, here we have curated:

7 Web Development Productivity Hacks for Your Web Developers

 1) Establish a Library of Code Snippets

Whether you hire dedicated web developers or work with a White Label partner, you must leverage a well-organized code library.

You may lead with a folder/directory of oft-used source code files or with a defined Integrated Development Environment (IDE). These will be your developers’ go-to libraries for reusable code snippets.

You must also encourage your team to master your IDE. This could save them thousands of hours in manual coding and hunt for the code snippets.

For instance, you may want to ask your development partner/team if they use a private code repository like Git. Or if they prefer switching to a dedicated source code editor every time they need to work on repetitive tasks like displaying Custom Fields in a WordPress loop or adding new CSS3 rules, etc.

2) Use the Right Web Development Framework

If chosen prudently, the right web development framework can summon a series of perks for your web development team.

But, your development team must also find the right balance using development frameworks. And the extra components that come with development frameworks should not outweigh the perks a framework offers.

A well-chosen web development framework brings perks like:

• Quick solutions to frequent development issues like web page layout problems, browser compatibility errors, etc.
• Performance-tested code lines that encourage developers to follow coding best practices
• Easy code reuse owing to API consistency
• Improved code quality and accelerated development process

If you hire a web development team, you must enquire about their choice of development framework and how they leverage it to grow their productivity.

3) Introduce Milestone-based Sprints

While many professional web development partners are familiar with the perks of agile development methodology. You must take a step ahead to introduce milestone-based sprints in your development team.

This helps speed up the development process and aligns simultaneous testing. Moreover, you can implement pair programming, where developers work in pairs to assist each other with development issues, code reusability, and sprints.

This method further helps reduce the code errors significantly. Thus, saving on the testing and bug fixing time.

4) Empower Your Team with Productive Web Development Tools

While you might want to keep limiting your investment in web development tools, it is crucial to equip your team with important tools.

These tools not only assist your team of web developers with the development process but also accelerate the process.

These could be:

• Crucial web design tools like Sketch, Photoshop, and Illustrator;
• IDEs, code editors like Sublime Text, version controls, or repositories like GitHub.
• A visual code editor like Visual Studio Code or VScode
• Foundation, which is a highly-productive responsive front-end framework
• A JavaScript task Runner like Grunt
• Chrome DevTools, CodePen, Sass, etc.

If you are hiring a White Label web development partner, he is most likely to lead with a well-established library of development tools. However, if you are building your dedicated development team, you must do your due diligence to collect the most-suited development tools for your business.

5) Help Your Team Collaborate Over Feature-rich Project Management Tools

Whether you work with your in-house team or hire a dedicated offshore development team, you must have excellent project management tools in your toolkit.

Some of the most crucial merits of project management tools include:

• Seamless team collaboration over tasks, conversations, coding issues, code library access, etc.
• Allocation and management of to-do lists, adding task status, creating notes, etc.
• Tracking milestone-based sprints and timesheets
• Easier management of offshore teams with recorded task status
• Getting rid of silos between the development, design, QA, and project management teams
• Allowing the developers to coordinate prudently over the access to shared tools

Some project management tools that can give you a substantial productivity boost include Proofhub, Jira, Basecamp, Trello, Toggl, Basecamp, Asana, etc.

While most of these tools offer similar features, you must view their specific feature list and plans. Thus, choose the tool that resonates the best with your business requirements.

6) Trigger a Collaborative Development Approach

While you work with your in-house team or a dedicated development team, you need to foster a collaborative development approach.

This approach includes developing a transparent communication channel, pair programming, encouraging the feedback culture, employing collaboration tools, etc.

Starting with developing a transparent communication channel, the project manager (or the stakeholders) must keep the development team aligned with the project’s goal.

With transparent communication, you can pass your vision about a project to your development team. And this translates into collaborative project development with higher productivity.

Next, you must encourage a feedback culture where QA guys and the in-house/offshore web developers can post constructive feedback. The sense of involvement helps the developers bring more productivity to the table.

Further, as aforementioned, pair programming is a great practice to accelerate the web development process while shrinking the coding errors.

7) Minimize To and Fro Between Tasks & Projects

Juggling the developers between two or more complex projects can also kill your productivity targets.

And that is one main reason you shouldn’t hire freelancers and opt for dedicated developers. Freelancers and shared resources often switch between multiple projects, which can challenge the development quality and productivity.

Thus, whether you work with an in-house or a dedicated offshore development team, you must lead with defined accountability and minimize the to & fro between tasks and projects.

Into the Conclusion

As we welcome the new era of web development technology with better user experience benchmarks, the average web development cost is on the rise. And therefore, business owners or web agencies cannot leave any stone unturned while setting the right productivity targets for their team.

Thus, we recommend you contemplate these seven productivity hacks and pass them across to your in-house or hired development team.

Conclusion