How to make developers life easy

Over my tenure as a junior engineer to an architect, there are few obvious things that could have made my life easier. Who would not need an outstanding release everytime and a reduction in overall costs? And doing so make the journey as stress-free as possible. These are some things that I believed helped me fast track and motivate my team and make their life easier and ofcourse spend time away from keyboard on holidays.

Cultivate fail fast mindset

Engineers should not be worried about killing the production system or dropping a database. Create enough guides and checks in place for accidental defect leakage into production. Build a robust CI/CD pipeline with appropriate automated tests and approvals at each levels (viz. dev, test, UAT, prod). The effort spend here will translate to cost and effort saved doing a disaster recovery. Creative minds perform better when there is a comfortable environment to work with.

The right tools and access

Give the developers all the access they need. May it be a cloud resource or a paid IDE. Let them work on the task at hand, than to wait for the access to be granted. In almost all cases, a day’s salary of an engineer is much more than the cost of access or the tools.

Invest on test cases

Let the tests take the burden out of the engineers to validate, if all the existing features work during a release. Focus on features covered in test cases than lines of code covered. It’s easier to cover…