Any business leader in the digital sector can explain what it means to work with software delivery teams. However, it is imperative to understand the key aspects of product delivery and how teams work before fully committing to hiring a tech partner for your project.
What is Software Delivery?
Before understanding why software delivery matters and its best practices, leaders, especially those new to the software business, must learn what software delivery is.
Product delivery teams plan, develop, test, and deploy software applications to end users. The process covers all the stages, from concept development to product launch and usage. In short, it’s the entire process of getting the product into the users’ hands.
Five Key Aspects of Successful Software Delivery
Project managers, developers, and testers work around the following key aspects of software delivery for each project.
Crafting clean and scalable code
Software delivery teams use coding to translate requirements into functional software. Teams must focus on writing clean, maintainable, and scalable code while complying with coding standards and development’s best practices. Moreover, practices like pair programming and code reviews ensure that knowledge sharing and team collaboration are essential.
Teams often streamline development activities using tools like integrated development environments (IDEs) and version control systems like Git. Following development, Scrum, Kanban, and associated agile methodologies help resources divide work into manageable sprints, allowing incremental delivery and continuous feedback.
Ensuring quality and reliability
One of the most critical phases in the entire SDLC, delivery teams ensure the application meets the end users’ functional and non-functional requirements. Your team must work on a test-driven development strategy, including unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and user acceptance testing.
Automated testing will speed up the process and ensure consistency, while manual testing will mainly cover exploratory and usability testing. Delivery managers must also prioritize performance, security, and accessibility testing to deliver a robust and reliable product. All the testing activities require seamless collaboration between developers and QA engineers to identify and resolve bugs early.
Deploying software and managing environments
Deployment delivers the application to its target environment, such as servers, cloud platforms, or user devices. Product delivery teams can process deployments using tools like CI/CD pipelines, packages like Docker, and orchestration systems like Kubernetes to deploy, manage, and scale applications.
At the time of deployment, it is equally vital that teams minimize downtime and ensure that rollback mechanisms are intact in case of failures. Second, DevOps teams must see through environment consistency across development, testing, and production to avoid deployment issues.
Maintaining code stability and efficiency
Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice where software delivery teams frequently merge code changes into a shared repository. This allows for early detection of issues, smoother collaboration, and a stable codebase.
Delivery teams must establish automated build and test pipelines to validate every change. Tools, including Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI/CD, allow developers to make small, incremental changes without risking significant conflicts and make identifying and fixing issues easier. They can also monitor build metrics to improve efficiency and maintain code quality.
Strengthening team communication and alignment
Collaboration is more of a non-technical aspect but still one of the most decisive ones for the success of any software delivery team. Your developers, testers, product owners, project managers, deployment squads, and other stakeholders must be perfectly aligned on goals and priorities.
Business leaders and technical executives should build a culture of transparency and trust and use tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Confluence for communication and documentation. Additionally, conducting regular stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives will help your teams stay on track and continuously improve.
This is particularly useful in DevOps or agile environments or for teams using other software delivery models, where cross-team collaboration is required to create faster feedback loops and smoother software delivery processes.
How Do Software Delivery Teams Help Businesses?
Delivery teams help leaders stay competitive and deliver top-tier products in the market. Here is a breakdown of all the significant benefits.
Improves software standards
Delivery teams focus on rigorous testing, code reviews, and compliance with industry practices. The goal is to produce a reliable, secure, and bug-free product. By implementing automated testing and continuous integration, teams can catch issues early and maintain high standards throughout the software development lifecycle.
A banking app will undergo security testing against quality standards if it wants to protect customer data. This will lead to higher customer trust and fewer post-launch issues.
Accelerates time-to-market
Delivery teams use different software delivery models, automation, and seamless collaboration to streamline development processes and facilitate faster development cycles and quicker time to market. Furthermore, by breaking projects into smaller, manageable sprints, teams can provide incremental value and effectively accommodate changes.
For example, a product delivery team using CI/CD pipelines for an ecommerce company will reduce the time to deploy new features from weeks to days. This will allow the company to acknowledge consumers’ needs during peak shopping seasons.
Leverages cross-functional expertise
Software delivery teams include resources from different skill sets, such as development, testing, deployment, and operations. They ensure that specialists handle all aspects of the development lifecycle, reducing the risk of oversights and providing a flawless final product.
For example, a healthcare service provider might consider working with a software delivery team with expertise in compliance, security, and scalability to build a telemedicine application that adheres to industry standards and manages rapid user growth.
Adapts to changing needs
Agile delivery teams are well-equipped to handle project iterations and changing market conditions. The agile practices allow them to pivot quickly, incorporate feedback, and deliver solutions that align with evolving business needs or client requirements.
For example, suppose a retail company worked with a delivery team to manage its inventory management platform during the COVID-19 pandemic. In that case, the curbside pickup feature could be added to meet customer demands and maintain business continuity.
Proactively manages risks
Project delivery teams proactively conduct regular code reviews, tests, and monitoring, reducing the likelihood of costly failures or security breaches.
Suppose a delivery or an outsourced team identifies a potential vulnerability in a payment processing system during testing and fixes it before launch. The proactive approach will likely prevent a possible data breach and financial loss for the fintech company.
Prioritizes user experience
Software delivery teams are also tasked with prioritizing user experience by incorporating user feedback, conducting usability testing, and designing intuitive interfaces. The purpose is to see if the software meets user needs, leading to higher satisfaction and engagement.
Suppose a travel booking platform incorporates personalized recommendations and a seamless booking process. In that case, it may experience a particular percentage increase in user retention due to quality browsing and checkout experience.
Optimizes costs and resources
Besides technical aspects, delivery teams also help save costs. In other words, optimizing development processes, reducing rework, and leveraging automation translates into efficient resource allocation and prevents budget overruns.
When a delivery team automates a route optimization system, the feature will likely reduce fuel costs by 15% and improve delivery efficiency for the logistics company.
Enables data-driven decisions
Technical delivery personnel use data analytics and monitoring tools to acquire insights into tool performance and user behavior. This data-focused approach helps technical decision-makers and stakeholders make informed decisions and prioritize features that deliver the most value.
When a streaming service provider evaluates user data to determine peak usage times and optimizes server capacity, the effort will reduce downtime and improve customer satisfaction.
Best Practices for Software Delivery Teams
The primary objective of best practices is to help teams exercise quality software delivery management and offer practical value to users.
Implement continuous delivery
Continuous delivery ensures that the tool is always on schedule or in a releasable mode. By automating everything from the build to the deployment phase, teams can deliver updates to users quickly and reliably. Hence, this limits the risk of errors, speeds up the time to market, and allows for faster feedback from your end users.
Use version control
Version control systems, such as Git, are best for tracking changes, collaborating effectively, and maintaining a codebase history. Such distributed platforms enable teams to work on different features at the same time, resolve conflicts, and revert to previous versions if required.
Gather frequent feedback
Get regular feedback from stakeholders, users, and team members to identify issues early and support development workarounds with business goals. Frequent feedback loops, including sprint reviews, will keep you closely checked on your project’s direction and meet user needs.
Drive continuous improvement
Identify areas for improvement and implement changes to refine workflows, tools, and collaboration methods over time. Top-performing teams regularly review their software delivery process and outcomes through retrospectives.
Utilize agile methodologies
Scrum, Kanban, and other popular agile frameworks encourage iterative development, collaboration, and adaptability. By breaking work into smaller, manageable tasks or sprints, teams can respond to project changes, deliver incremental value, and focus on customer needs and preferences.
Track important metrics
Tracking metrics like cycle time, deployment frequency, defect rates, change failure rates, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and similar ones extracts insights into team performance and product quality. These metrics help managers locate bottlenecks, measure progress, and make data-driven decisions.
Be flexible and adaptable
Software development isn’t a straightforward road. Teams must understand that adapting to change is essential, whether it’s shifting requirements, new technologies, or market demands. Your delivery teams must be flexible enough to ensure that your processes, tech stack, and outputs can adapt without stopping progress.
Use iterative development
Iterative development involves building software in small, marginal steps. Each iteration provides a functional aspect of the tool, which can be used for early testing, validation, and improvement. Experienced delivery teams use iterative development to alleviate risks and ensure the end product meets user expectations.
Invest in DevOps
DevOps teams bridge the gap between development and operations to streamline collaboration and automation efficiency. Start investing in tools and forge a culture that supports continuous integration, delivery, and monitoring to improve workflow and reliability.
Conclusion
According to Statista’s 2023 survey, on average, 73.7% of projects were reported as delivered on time. This indicates that there is still plenty of room for improvement, which service providers can do by following the best practices discussed above.
Even if business leaders find it difficult to leverage in-house delivery teams for their digital products, they can always partner with a technology associate for industry-specific expertise.
