Digital Transformation: The Ultimate Customer Experience Overhaul

Fifty-three percent of early digital adopters say customer experiences have become a priority for their organizations over the past 12 months. This figure rises to a whopping 93% for advanced digital adopters, according to a 2023 study conducted by Foundry, an IDG, Inc. Company. This survey highlights customer-centricity as a key approach to a successful digital revolution.

Bringing out the importance of putting the customer at the center of any digital transformation strategy, Jeff Bezos once said, “There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day-one vitality.”

So how does digital transformation impact the customer experience?

By Offering A Hyperpersonalized Experience

Customers now expect brands to understand their needs and provide a more tailored experience. AI and machine learning can help make sense of the data shared by customers and allow for every customer interaction to be unique and personal.

Epsilon research (via TechCrunch) also indicated that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

Not just this, when brands get personalization right, marketing spending can deliver five to eight times the ROI and lift sales by 10% or more, according to McKinsey.

Three Ways To Implement Personalization Using AI

1. Analyze customer data: Since the standard CRM captures limited data and static buyer personas are too generic, AI uses the (vast) collected data and makes sense of it to get individual personalization right. Be it real-time location, context, behavior or values, AI works on critical customer variables and helps marketers understand what to offer, when and where.

2. Exclude data paralysis: Marketers have access to overwhelming sets of data. AI can help in this pursuit by collecting data that will continually evolve and adapt, helping marketers implement a more effective personalization strategy that delivers results.

3. Create evolving customer profiles: Using AI to create and target unique customer profiles can provide unique customer experiences. This way, each customer’s unique preferences will be catered to, leading to more successful campaigns.

By Establishing Omnichannel Functionalities

Businesses can tailor their messaging and promotions more effectively by offering a consistent customer experience across all channels.

The same is supported by a Forrester study that says that the companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies enjoy a 10% Y-O-Y growth, a 10% increase in average order value and a 25% increase in close rates.

An omnichannel experience is made of three essential components: always available, consistent and personalized. So how can businesses provide an omnichannel experience to their customers?

Steps to Provide An Omnichannel Experience

• Define strategy and customer touchpoints: Have a clear plan in place with objectives, target audience, success metrics and adaptation. Identify customer touchpoints and pain points across all channels to upgrade the experience.

• Implement integrated technology: Invest in an integrated software architecture (omnichannel desktop, back-end interfaces and advanced analytics). This can include integrating your point-of-sale systems, customer relationship management tools and customer-facing platforms, among other tools.

• Get feedback and improvise: Employ platforms that use AI and advanced analytics to simplify heaps of customer feedback and customer-journey breakpoints. Monitor this and adjust your approach based on their needs and preferences.

By Providing Seamless Customer Support

Right from chatbots that lead to increased response time and reduced repetitive queries to decoding customer behavior and purchasing patterns, AI is the key to enabling real-time service for customer support platforms.

AI chatbots improve the customer experience by offering:

• Personalized conversation using stored data: AI chatbots can personalize their responses based on stored customer data, such as their purchase history and previous communication.

• Speedy and effective resolutions: AI chatbots can provide 24/7 support, personalized responses, faster response times, consistency, reduced errors, data collection and analysis, cost savings and increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

By Gathering Customer Feedback For Continuous Improvement

In today’s tech-driven world, traditional quantitative feedback-gathering methods are losing their importance. Reality demands companies leverage AI and machine learning to enhance their survey-forming and survey-analyzing efficiency.

While there are many ways to gather customer feedback via AI, the three most common approaches are as follows.

Three Ways To Gather Customer Feedback

1. Feedback tools: Use tools that empower AI to capture and analyze specialized vocabulary used by customers in answering feedback questions. The deep insights shared by AI can help marketers plan their customer satisfaction and retention strategies.

2. Automated forms: Automated forms are another effective way to gather customer feedback without disturbing the customer journey. The process can even be automated by telling the tools/AI processes when to shoot an email/SMS with the feedback form.

3. Customer surveys: While focus groups and personal interviews are still in vogue, customer surveys rolled out in bulk can work equally well. That is if AI is integrated to make sense of the answers, giving marketers insightful gleams into the customers’ needs and wants.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is key to maximizing customer experience in today's world. In the words of Mckinsey’s senior partner Tjark Freundt, “Effective customer-experience transformations require a clear vision and a customer-centric, ambitious articulation of goals.” This can be achieved with companies using AI-produced insights to see not just where customer problems are but what’s causing them and how they can be solved. And figures say that companies earning $1 billion a year earn an additional $700 million over three years by investing in customer experience.

Looking to hire skilled software developers? Contact TP&P Technology - Leading Software Outsourcing Company in Vietnam Today

Article resource: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/05/31/digital-transformation-the-ultimate-customer-experience-overhaul/?sh=2001056d4254

How To Make Sure That Your Product Is Ready For Software Development

Bringing any digital product into being is a complex process. Nevertheless, as software developers, we often meet clients who believe that properly written code can solve any problem and is the Holy Grail of building a product. The truth is; however, that code itself lies on the foundation of thorough preparations and includes a lot of stages and processes.

There are situations when a client approaches us after a failed attempt to build their application with other developers. Those other developers may convince customers that the proposal is perfectly complete, but in the end, they turn out to be unable to deliver the expected results exactly because they don't have a full statement of work.

The Importance Of User Experience Design

Based on hundreds of meetings, I find that one of the most overlooked parts of software development is user experience design. Sometimes, when we start talking about it with clients, they do not take it seriously since they believe that these conversations should be held with designers, not with software developers.

As a result of neglect of UX, I often meet clients who have only the idea of an application with a couple of vaguely described features. They see no more than 20% to 30% of their future product and believe it to be enough to start developing it.

UX is an important part of our process. Before writing code, developers need to know what exactly they are working on. I think it's particularly important to base solutions on specifications defined during user research and by the product team.

So, what needs to be done from the point of view of the design team prior to starting the code production per se? There are a few important prerequisites that can be combined into a sort of checklist.

Specify Target Audiences

It's next to impossible to develop a high-quality, sought-after product without knowing who is going to use it. Every function of your product should solve some problem a user has or help them with achieving their goals. It's necessary to define crucial features and extract non-functional requirements based on key user needs.

You can turn to the persona method (putting yourself in the shoes of your users) in order to systemize what you know about the target audience. It requires building personas for each user type of your product according to preliminary conducted user research. A persona usually consists of approximate age and income, location, lifestyle and goals that they want to achieve by using the product.

Defining your users helps with your empathy and understanding toward them. For instance, if we assume that your target audience lives in the U.S., they are very likely to use a two- to three-year-old iPhone. Does this impact what solutions you should employ while developing software? Yes, it does.

Define User Needs

When you know who you are developing your product for, you can better and more broadly understand what they may need from it. I like to use the user story method to describe functional requirements. User stories are a universal language that helps to efficiently convey to everyone on the team—from analysts to coders—what the product should do.

You can use the following format to craft a user story: "As a [role description], I want [capability], so that [received benefit]." In one sentence, it explains who your target audience is, what they should be able to do with your app and which benefits it should give them.

Describe MVP

Now that you understand what exact user needs your app is going to address, you can precisely describe the minimal viable product. The description should be short and clear, like an elevator pitch, and include a definition of the customers, the value of your solution and how it differs from competitors.

Make sure to also mention expected business outcomes and how you are going to measure them. In the end, define criteria for assessment of implementation correctness. Developers need to understand what results are expected from their work and be able to imagine the final product.

Make And Test Prototypes

When the key functions and target platform for your app are defined, it's time to convert them into simple black, gray and white wireframes linked together into a clickable prototype covering all user stories. The prototype is necessary to evaluate your ideas about the product and validate its functionality through usability testing.

It's much cheaper and faster to make sure that everything works properly during the prototype stage rather than when the app is released. During this stage, the team can identify all sorts of issues, from misleading button labels to holes in user flows.

As a result, you end up with the assurance that the product is going to work well and there will be no need to redevelop it again later. Besides, it's much easier to explain to software developers what you expect from them with a prototype. It saves a lot of time and money. When prototyping is completed, usually the stage of visual design starts, which defines how the interface of the product is going to look.

There's one more thing that you should know in order to successfully design your product. Before starting the UX process, it's crucial to determine prerequisites and your company's definition of complete for each step of this journey. To avoid any mess, you need to know what exactly is necessary to kickstart each phase and what outcomes you should get at the end of them.

It doesn't matter if you have your own developers team or you are outsourcing it; without this preliminary UX design work, I have found that no software development proposal can be as efficient as it needs to be and deliver optimal results.

Looking to hire skilled software developers? Contact TP&P Technology - Leading Software Outsourcing Company in Vietnam Today

Article resource:https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/04/11/how-to-make-sure-that-your-product-is-ready-for-software-development/?sh=232066b74dd3

How Blockchain Technology Is Changing The World

 We see the stories every day. Feds charge 21 people in global crypto money laundering bust. FTX not only filed for bankruptcy, but hackers allegedly stole customer assets. Cryptocurrency investors have lost more than $2 trillion in the past year.

On CRM: 5 Myths About ChatGPT

 There has been a lot written about ChatGPT, the open-source, AI-driven conversational chatbot released late last year by OpenAI. It's a powerful tool and its underlying technology will have a big impact on both our professional and personal lives in the coming years. But the media loves to over-hype things - particularly tech things - so it's important to know what's real, and what's myth, about this new platform. So let's focus on the myths.

How Transparent Is Your Software Outsourcing Vendor?

 Over the years and across the countless number of products that I have helped bring to market, the ones that nearly failed were the ones that an organization I worked with at the time used an external software outsourcing vendor. The vendors in question ultimately were selected because an executive's friend referred them or had a piece of the action getting some sort of kickback.

In one particular case, it led to quick agreements that based the relationship on just sheer speculation that the vendor was to be trusted, and thorough vetting was not required. 

The first red flag popped up when the vendors refused our software engineering teams to review detailed resumes. Instead, we received a card stating that the individual had "X" number of years of experience with the exact technology stack that we were using. Because of this, the executive team put pressure on the engineering team to get started right away.

There was not a single test, nor line of code reviewed, nor even questions about code structure and object-oriented programming — not even a problem to solve to see how the engineer approached complex problems. The team grumbled a bit and just focused on the day-to-day while getting the new front end, back end and, supposedly, a tech-lead ready to ramp up on the systems.

The second red flag came when the first group of engineers started onboarding with our teams. It took days of back and forth with the engineers because they were nine hours ahead. It took four to six weeks to start seeing production delivery. The code that was delivered did not pass testing. And a junior developer replaced the senior tech lead.

Staff had to spend more time coaching, teaching and guiding the outsourcing team, which took focus away from critical deliverables and ultimately delayed business objectives by several months. The outcome affected the business, which lost opportunities and frayed existing client relationships. In the end, we all learned a valuable lesson, and we had to have a heart-to-heart talk with the decision-makers concerning all the problems encountered when our teams could not vet the vendor and its candidates thoroughly.

After that, I made sure to review in-depth every single vendor. Yet I still faced enormous challenges when it came to vendor transparency on talent, costs, skills and performance. Other problematic areas I commonly discovered using different vendors was talent assigned to other projects while working on my products, talent rotation and engineers unavailable when meeting critical production deadlines.

To this day, when talking with technology executives, those similar gaps still come up, so I decided to tackle that challenge and push for greater industry transparency.

In leading a software engineering services organization, a strategy I share with business owners, engineering stakeholders and economic buyers is to approach software outsourcing vendors with a vetting plan that focuses on total transparency, talent evaluation, onboarding process strategy, training and retention programs. Furthermore, the vendor needs to be able to understand fully what your needs are. If they don't get it, move on.

So even if you are a small startup or mid-size company, it is useful to have preliminary documentation on the following, if applicable. Based on my experience, here are a few questions to ask about your business before engaging a vendor.

What are your business overview and objectives? 

Spell out what it is that your business is trying to achieve. Also, review the reasons the initiative requires certain technical elements to materialize and maximize ROI.

What does your tech stack look like?

Break down the technology stack you are using or looking to use. This overview guideline is basic and can expand depending on complexity and scope. This includes a full technical stack review, meaning apps and data, utilities, DevOps and business tools. A basic product introduction might entail:

• Agile PM Platform: Documentation (e.g., Jira, Rally, Trello, etc.) 

• Repositories (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, etc..) 

• UX: Adaptive, technical feasibility, asset manipulation

• UI: Performance-optimized

• Front End: Performance/ReST APIs focusing on the presentation layer of architecture schema

• Back End: Schema cocreation/authentication/data management

• iOS: Objective C/Swift/React Native/Flutter

• Android: Android Dev Kit/Java /Kotlin/React Native/Flutter

• QA: Test-driven development/unit testing

• DevOps: Docker/Kubernetes

• Security: Best practices 

• Compliance: Protocols 

• Server Setup: Local, staging, testing, release/production 

What does your architecture overview/workflow/diagram look like? 

1. Presentation Layer: This entails all the components for users to interact with the application (UI stuff too). It is for processing the user's input and returning the accurate response to the user.

2. Service Layer: This serves as a transactional boundary and contains both the application and proprietary infrastructure services.

3. Business Layer: This includes the core business rules and functionality of the application.

4. Data Layer: It's the bottom layer of the application. It communicates with stored user data.

After signing an NDA and presenting the software outsourcing vendor, your business requirements document should cover the following, which you may want the vendor to address:

• Ability to review resumes

• Ability to review preliminary screens from the resumes proposed

• Ability to provide calibration feedback and pivot the search

• Review preliminary technical screen 

• Review technical testing video and actual code of those tests and challenges 

• View resource salary requirements, taxes, benefits costs, insurance and vendor profit (total cost of ownership calculator)

• Review onboarding strategy

• Resource equal replacement contract clause

Bottom Line

Doing your due diligence before embarking on a technical project with software outsourcing vendors is vital to ensure business success. Take time to review all necessary components of such a partnership to ensure goals are understood and processes are outlined across the team from the start of the collaboration.

Looking to hire skilled software developers? Contact TP&P Technology - Leading Software Outsourcing Company in Vietnam Today

Article resource: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/07/13/how-transparent-is-your-software-outsourcing-vendor/?sh=200113e6ef2a

Five Indicators You Need To Outsource Software Development

 Over the past few years, the position of software outsourcing has been strengthened due to more and more companies opting for custom software solutions or involving external experts to extend the capabilities of internal tech teams.

There are certainly benefits to outsourcing, especially since you get a solution that is designed to address your business or technical challenges. But is it the right option for your company, and when is it time to start outsourcing your software development?

Here are the five most prominent signs you need to kick off your hunt for a reliable software development partner.

Lack Of The Necessary Expertise And Skills

Unless your primary business focus is software development, chances are high that you reach a point when the in-house team lacks some specific skills needed to meet project needs.

For example, your project takes an unexpected pivot—now it requires blockchain or artificial intelligence to function properly, but your team has little or no experience working with these technologies. One option is to retrain your existing team or assemble a new one. But both scenarios require an investment of many hours and resources. With outsourcing, you can scale up your team with the right specialist anytime.

An Overloaded In-House Team

With the growth of your business, the need for software development will also grow exponentially. If you have an in-house team working full-time on your project, it may happen that a project load exceeds its timeline, making it nearly impossible to keep up with an ongoing project or take on a new one. Regular work on weekends or late at night isn’t the best way to get your project done since your team will most likely burn out.

In this case, get a reliable software development partner to power up your in-house team. This will help expedite the process and get everything done on time.

The Necessity To Speed Up

Occasionally, the timeframes for a project delivery are limited. That might become an issue as no one wants their release to go live later as opposed to sooner. This is especially true when you’re about to present a new feature in an app or you want to stay ahead of your competitors.

If you feel your team cannot keep up with fast updates and you need help to stay ahead of the game, it’s time to outsource your project development. Once you give it a chance, you’ll be able to speed up the delivery of your project and see tangible results faster.

Flexible Workload Of In-House Team

If your project’s expansion is overtaxing resources that are already stretched to capacity, it’s time to get outside help. Scaling your team with full-time employees is a lengthy and costly process. And you cannot hire a specialist just to carry out a few tasks—you also need to cover their idle time. Choosing outsourcers on a flexible model of cooperation could be the cure to overspending and missed deadlines.

Or what if you find yourself unexpectedly having to deliver a large number of updates to outperform your key competitors or improve your services? A solution to this problem can be found in outsourcing to a third-party vendor that is equipped to manage any volume of development processes that you are not, and they can jump on and off your project at any time.

While outsourcing, you can build a team based on your current workload and high-priority tasks. For example, the time and material engagement model lets you pay the vendor for the amount of time the team spent on your project. If your project requires more hands, you can opt for the staff augmentation model.

Increasing Difficulty Of Finding The Right Talent

Whenever you decide to find a new teammate, you’ll have to grapple with the ever-rising challenge of filling in your talent gaps. According to U.S. Labor statistics, the global talent shortage is projected to reach 85.2 million, which is set to result in a loss of $8.4 trillion in revenue.

Apart from the global tech talent shortage, there is a rising demand for software engineers. Job openings for software engineers, testers and other software development specialists are projected to grow by 25% year over year from 2021 to 2030.

Hiring top-notch talent is easier with outsourcing. You get access to battle-tested software engineers with the right expertise at any time without having to jump on the recruitment wagon again and again.

Outsource The Right Way

Outsourcing all alone can’t do the trick and solve all your business issues at once. However, doing it with the right team that has the right skills can save thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. Along with this, you have access to a larger talent pool with greater flexibility. It’s not a coincidence that more businesses are looking for software development outsourcing services rather than assembling an in-house team.

However, it’s necessary to find a reliable tech partner that can satisfy all your business needs and deliver a high-quality software solution. Following this algorithm may help you:

• Establish your own requirements and decide on the budget

• Research companies or ask for recommendations

• Create a shortlist of the best software development companies for your needs

• Check their technical expertise and experience in an industry or projects similar to yours

• Pay attention to the chemistry between your potential vendor and you

Hiring a software development consultant is always an option. Even if you don’t end up with the vendor as their go-to company to work on the version of your future software, they can help you with business analysis, research and even finding the right company to work on your project.

With careful consideration, software development outsourcing can take the burden of developing a custom solution off your shoulders so your business can achieve its objectives.

Looking to hire skilled software developers? Contact TP&P Technology - Leading Software Outsourcing Company in Vietnam Today

Article resource: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/12/01/five-indicators-you-need-to-outsource-software-development/?sh=681ee4c34f75

Improving The Retail Customer Experience With Technology

 How can retailers use technology to enhance the shopping journey? Technology may have the potential to complicate a retail experience, but technology can also improve the customer journey. At the height of the pandemic, companies were forced to take a good look at how they could adapt without traditional in-person, brick-and-mortar shopping. At Rebag, the luxury resale platform I founded, we regularly question how we could improve and elevate the customer experience through technology.

5 Ways to Monitor Your IT Network and Infrastructure

As your network grows, it gets more difficult to ensure it is working as expected. You must understand all the devices connected to your network to manage your IT infrastructure effectively. 

3 Reasons Southeast Asia Is A Hot Market For Tech Startups

 While the U.S. market is becoming more expensive and its valuations less and less linked to fundamentals, local venture capitalists are actively seeking new growth markets. Many are keeping an eye on Southeast Asian countries. This is a diverse but very strong prospective market with a focus in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.

Top Tips to Choose a Software Development Company in 10 Steps

The global software development market is growing at an unprecedented pace. In 2019, the industry was worth around $457 billion and was estimated to reach $777 billion by 2022.

With such huge growth potential, it’s no wonder that more and more businesses are looking to invest in bespoke software solutions. But with so many options out there, how can you be sure to choose the right software development company for your needs?

5 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Software Development Team

These questions will help you choose the right software development firm for you and also ensure there are absolutely no negative surprises for you when the time comes for delivery. 

Whether a business has just started out or is soaring high into the sky, the software is a critical part of any business. And rest assured, if you want to run a successful business and compete with the data-driven digital world, you need software. If you have the required resources for software development, well and good. If not, you first have to choose a software development team with the sole aim of developing software that meets your business needs.

Machine Learning for Data Management

Data impacts nearly every part of our lives and is critical for companies to stay relevant. It has transformed almost every industry to drive efficiency, better insights, and business growth.

However, managing this data can take an enormous amount of time and expense. Between security, auditing, organizing, and more, managing data sets can create a significant strain on employee time and energy. In fact, most data scientists and business analysts spend around 80% of their time finding, cleaning, and reorganizing data sets. This leaves just 20% of their time to spend on value-generating activities.

Data Engineer vs Data Scientist: What’s the Difference?

The data engineer equips the business with the ability to move data from place to place, known as data pipelines. Data engineers provide data to the data science teams.

The data scientist consumes data provided by the data engineers and interprets it to say something meaningful to decision-makers in the company.

In this article, let’s dive a little deeper into the roles of data engineer and data scientist.

The Important Role of Design Thinking in Software Development

 Design thinking is at the forefront of innovation. It's an approach that's been used by some of the biggest names in technology and software development, including Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and more. Professors at top universities and institutions like MIT and Harvard teach this core principle, as well. 

If you're curious about design thinking in software development, MJV Technology & Innovation's Design Thinking Book is considered to be the leading resource in the field. It presents case studies that can be analyzed to get on the path toward innovation, equipping you with all of the essential knowledge, skills, techniques, and tools required to effectively implement design thinking.

10 ways DevOps can help reduce technical debt

 Technical debt is inevitable for most organizations, but DevOps practices can help minimize it. Consider these tips. 

Technical debt is unavoidable. And if it is not addressed, it can hamper your development process and product quality. While it costs time and money to fix accrued technical debt, prevention is better than cure. According to Gartner, infrastructure and operations leaders who can actively manage and reduce technical debt will achieve 50 percent faster delivery times.

DevOps has emerged as the solution to many challenges in the IT industry. It can also address the technical debt challenge. Here are ten ways DevOps can help your business manage and reduce technical debt.

1. Test in earlier stages of software development

A key DevOps practice, shift-left testing or testing early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), helps find and prevent errors early in the delivery process. It includes unit tests, static code analysis, code coverage analysis, and other code-level practices to catch errors at the earliest stage possible, when they cost the least to fix. 

Additionally, testing as you develop improves code design and makes it easier for development teams to understand in the future. Thus, early testing reduces technical debt and lowers costs in the long term.

2. Identify and solve major problems first

The DevOps lifecycle has lean, short feedback cycles and faster iterations due to enhanced collaboration between teams. Therefore, bugs, usability issues, and security vulnerabilities do not have to wait until the next feature release to get a fix. And major problems that can impact users or operations are fixed immediately.

You can optimize the process further by categorizing or ranking problems from high to low priority to determine which issues to resolve first. Then have all hands on deck to solve the major problems first, but do not leave any for later.

3. Establish better collaboration between development and operations teams

In most cases, technical debt occurs because development teams take shortcuts to meet tight deadlines and struggle with constant changes. But better collaboration between dev and ops can shorten SDLC, fasten deployments, and increase their frequency. Moreover, CI/CD and continuous testing make it easier for teams to deal with changes. Overall, the collaborative culture encourages code reviews, good coding practices, and robust testing with mutual help.

4. Emphasize more automation

When you automate routine time-consuming tasks and tasks that tend to be more prone to errors, your teams have more time to repay technical debt.

Moreover, automation embedded into CI/CD with automated testing, automated build, and infrastructure as code (IaC) helps identify debt earlier and enables continuous debt repayment. It also enforces code quality standards. Thus, automation can relieve current technical debt while also avoiding future debt.

5. Don't leave it for later

Technical debt is best controlled when managed continuously, which becomes easier with DevOps. As it facilitates constant communication, teams can track debt, facilitate awareness and resolve it as soon as possible. Team leaders can also include technical debt review into backlog and schedule maintenance sprints to deal with it promptly. Moreover, DevOps reduces the chances of incomplete or deferred tasks in the backlog, helping prevent technical debt.

6. Establish a DevOps culture

A true DevOps culture can be the key to managing technical debt over long periods. DevOps culture encourages strong collaboration between cross-functional teams, provides autonomy and ownership, and practices continuous feedback and improvement. It provides an effective platform to track technical debt, calculate, and communicate it to other teams. Moreover, DevOps culture can be used to educate and inform developers of the kind of codes that introduce bugs in the future and raise the code quality.

7. Set precise DevOps standards

Well-defined DevOps standards enable you to create quality gates on each code check-in, then run tests and deploy. It saves your teams from repetitive, error-prone manual tasks and optimizes their development efforts.

Enforcing DevOps standards also prevent your teams from taking process shortcuts (like cutting corners in writing code), which is one of the biggest contributors to technical debt. Thus, precise DevOps standards can maintain a high level of productivity and quality while keeping team morale high, indirectly saving money for your company.

8. Make the deployment process smoother

A smoother deployment process can make it easy for the DevOps team to identify and reduce technical debt. You can consider employing containers to make deployments easier. Containers are lightweight and portable, which simplifies application development and deployment. Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes automate container lifecycle in production, enabling your teams to focus on high-value tasks of refactoring applications or trimming technical debt.

9. Implement API-first model

How application components communicate is also important in addressing technical debt because technical debt is often caused by different systems accessing services and data in ways other teams do not expect.

Implementing APIs makes interfaces more visible and increases the durability of communications. Due to loose coupling between applications, an API-based model enables teams to make changes quickly without impacting existing structures. Moreover, any team that later interacts with a service in question has a clearly defined set of expectations. As a result, it is easier to roll out features/changes with less technical debt.

10. Deploy self-service pipelines for common tasks

Another strategic way to reduce technical debt is to automate or streamline tasks that add time and cost to the development process but do not add value to the product. Such tasks can include meeting compliance requirements, activities reports, and work handoffs from one person to another.

Moreover, you can implement self-service pipelines for common tasks such as compiling code, running tests, building containers, etc. It saves time for teams, enabling them to contribute their efforts to managing and reducing technical debt.

DevOps cannot address all the challenges around technical debt. But it can detect debt early, reduce bugs, and control code quality, which slows debt accumulation and helps keep it below a maintainable threshold. And while you may not be able to address all of your technical debt right away, these tips will certainly help you tackle technical debt challenges efficiently.

Need Help With Your IT Projects? Contact TP&P Technology - Leading Software Engineering Company in Vietnam Today

Article source: https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2022/6/devops-reduce-technical-debt

3 infrastructure principles every IT leader should follow

Leading an IT team and developing code share a few key tenets. Consider these three principles to ensure that your team is flexible, efficient, and prepared

In my experience building and training cross-functional teams, I’ve identified three main principles that apply to both engineering and IT. These principles should be taught to all new hires and adopted by IT leaders everywhere.

Infrastructure principle 1: Build for simplicity

The old adage “Keep it super simple” (KISS) sounds trite but is worth following – no matter how complex your IT system may be.

Would you rather have a clever algorithm that nets a two percent performance improvement or code that is easy to read at 2 am when you’re at home trying to figure out why your site is down? The choice should be clear: Code that’s understandable – especially under less than ideal circumstances – is code that will help you out of a bind and will be easier to maintain, train new hires on, and build. 

Part of simplicity also means meeting your employees where they are. Companies need change as they scale, but in periods of rapid growth, they must also expand their IT team at a similar pace and create systems that reduce friction as much as possible. An example of these sorts of systems is automating your IT ticketing system.

At Coda, there’s an integration between a Coda doc and Slack to automate IT requests. An employee can ask for help in a designated Slack channel, and someone from the IT team replies with a ticket emoji. That emoji triggers the creation of a new ticket in a triaging and tracking doc and assigns an owner to the ticket based on the type of request.

In this way, employees can ask for help with the tools they’re already using for work without having to complete a form or log into separate software. On the IT side, you’re able to automate tasks that would otherwise be manual.

Remember, it’s critical to continue adapting these systems as your company grows and ticketing volume increases.

Infrastructure principle 2: Prepare for failure

It’s a fact of life that all software fails, and history proves that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. When you design and test your systems to cascade into the backup plan if needed, many problems can be easily avoided or mitigated.

A classic software engineering example is the system by which on-call engineers access production databases. A well-designed system provides key auditing and compliance mechanisms along with access, but if it goes down, you need a secondary system that is just as compliant with your security policies. Importantly, because that secondary access system isn’t used often, it requires robust documentation and needs to be periodically tested, ideally once a quarter.

IT systems, while only internal-facing, should be designed the same way. Approval and escalation processes should always have a backup, playbooks should be written down, and no one person should hold the necessary keys to make changes. If the primary point person is unavailable for any reason, you should still be able to perform business as usual.

Planning for “people” transitions is just as critical. The IT department should always incorporate best practices with documentation and backup plans. This can be as simple as having an on-call engineer when the IT person is on vacation. As your company scales and departments expand, these best practices should also scale. That way, when a critical team member leaves the company, there’s already robust documentation and a succession plan in place.

Infrastructure principle 3: Design infrastructure as meticulously as you write code

Across the board, you should design your internal systems as meticulously as you write code. You would never launch an app without careful planning, seeing around all corners, and addressing P0 bugs. The same should apply to IT.

Treat infrastructure as something as precious as software. No seasoned engineer would find it acceptable to log into a production machine and change code on the fly outside of an emergency – why should your IT configuration be any different?

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Article source: https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2022/7/infrastructure-principles-every-it-leader-should-follow 

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If you're in the software development industry, you probably understand why customer experience is critical. Many established corporations understand this and commit themselves to enhancing user experience and work hard to improve it. For example, research shows that 86% of clients will pay more if the user experience is top-notch. As a software entrepreneur looking to achieve optimal customer satisfaction, you want to focus on customer experience.

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On a global scale, COVID-19 has disrupted business. Outsourcing providers have also been affected. During the pandemic, CBI published a study on how to respond to COVID-19 in the IT and Business Process Outsourcing sector (ITO/BPO). 

The study showed clients cancelling non-essential activities. Clients also moved their outsourced tasks back in-house. Some even put their software development projects on hold. 

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