Contact us anytime to know more - Kuldeep K., Founder & CEO CISIN
Staff augmentation, its significance to your company, and best practices to take advantage of it in 2023 are discussed extensively here in this comprehensive guide. Regardless of your experience or knowledge base, this piece offers valuable advice you can benefit from immediately.
As part of our exploration into staff augmentation, we will uncover its true definition, ways in which it may best benefit your company, differences between staff augmentation and outsourcing arrangements, and any additional pertinent details that can aid those interested in using it themselves in business. After reading through this article, you can be certain of having gained the tools and know-how needed to utilize staff augmentation for optimal project implementation and team performance by employing expert skills from within teams.
Important Staff Augmentation Best Practices
Clearly Define Job Roles And Expectations
Before recruiting and hiring new personnel, identify areas where your existing team lacks expertise. Doing this will ensure you find the appropriate applicant while filling in any knowledge gaps required to finish software development projects successfully.
Next, outline your project goals and objectives and any qualifications needed in new hires. Determining project timelines and specific tasks' due dates and results may prove valuable; if this process proves challenging or you lack time for its completion, hiring an expert project manager who can oversee hiring new tech talent and monitor the project's progression can prove immensely helpful.
Keep Lines Of Communication Open And Transparent With Enhanced Staff Members
One of the major obstacles to working with an expanded staff is communication. Yet, this vital aspect is essential for efficiency, results in more projects completed on schedule, and helps your team meet deadlines more smoothly.
McKinsey research indicates that teams with strong connections are 20-25% more productive. Employees working remotely and in hybrid teams report being five times more likely to admit being productive, so these findings also apply.
Staff augmentation best practices suggest regularly communicating in person via video conferencing software such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams and platforms like Slack; such communication allows for relationship growth and improvement while real-time resolution of problems and concerns is possible.
Make Use Of Communication And Project Management Resources
Small and midsized businesses frequently assign project or team managers the resources and management duties needed for more efficient project schedules, better budget compliance and compliance with schedule, increased outputs, and quality work. This often results in faster completion times, budgetary savings, and compliance benefits for their projects.MUtilizing project and communication tools is one of the keys to effective project management, particularly if your workforce includes additional employees.
Utilize project management software such as Monday.com, Jira, Asana, and Trello to monitor team progress and facilitate effective communication among experts from different nations and time zones. A project manager or business leader can easily track progress. At the same time, new team members understand exactly what is expected of them and when deadlines should be met. work better for complex projects. At the same time, Trello may be best suited to smaller teams or projects with simpler objectives.
Keep Track Of Your Project Procedures And Share Knowledge
Knowledge transfer is vital throughout any project, especially when using external staff augmentation services. Scalability depends on everyone having access to all the relevant data required to perform effectively in their jobs; knowledge sharing provides this vital asset.
A secure method for exchanging information must exist - training manuals, examples, films, and reports related to projects can all help. Following are best practices for knowledge transfer that may assist staff augmentation initiatives:
- An elaborate process to outline appropriate methods of sharing knowledge.
- Using Google Drive as a document management system, your team can organize and store explicit and tacit knowledge that they can later share with relevant parties.
- Tools designed for project management and communication, like Slack and Jira, help manage projects more efficiently by tracking tasks, streamlining communication channels, and recording the results of meetings and calls.
- As project managers, they play an invaluable role in successfully overseeing information sharing and transfer.
Assure the augmented staff has all of the resources and knowledge necessary to start working and then transfer any knowledge gained after completion of services required.
Continue To Participate In The Project Execution Process
Specialist needs may require staff augmentation, with outside experts often playing a pivotal role in seeing through successful project completion. Maintaining their productivity and efficiency lies within the parameters of staff augmentation best practices to ensure outside specialists meet deadlines, adhere to financial constraints, have access to necessary resources, and prioritize tasks accordingly.
Alternatively, a project or team manager could be the intermediary between you and your augmented employees. They will ensure smooth operations. These five code review best practices ensure every new feature or product is written with high-quality code, providing fresh perspective by uncovering any poor design patterns or bugs that arise during development.
Also read: How Many IT Companies Use Staff Augmentation? The Surprising Impact on Cost and Efficiency Revealed!
Code Review Best Practices
Create A Code Review Checklist
Make it easier to meet quality assurance checks before accepting code into the codebase with an efficient review checklist that details questions and guidelines your team must abide by during code reviews. Consider including some or all of these:
- Readability of Codes: Does the code contain any unnecessary comments or statements?
- Security: Does the code of your system leave it vulnerable to cyber attacks?
- Test Coverage: Should more cases be tested?
- Architecture: Does the code meet concern separation through encapsulation and modularization?
- Reusability: Does the code employ services, functions, and components that can be reused?
Introduce Code Review Metrics
Without accurately measuring someone else's code, corrections cannot be made. Metrics that are objective help in gauging the effectiveness of reviews, measuring the effects of process modifications, and projecting the length of time to finish an assignment.
Notable metrics of review include:
- Inspection Rate: Determined by dividing lines of code by inspection hours, your team reviews an amount of code over a given time. If reviewing takes more time than planned, readability issues could exist and need fixing immediately.
- Defect Rate: To measure how often defects appear in inspection hours, divide the total number of defects by total inspection hours; this metric helps evaluate testing processes by showing whether bugs take too much time to identify; for instance, if developers need extra time identifying bugs they might require more advanced testing equipment.
- Defect density measures the number of defects found within an amount of code by dividing their total by the number of lines of code (kLOC). You can use defect density to direct more resources towards vulnerable components, using defect density as an indicator that certain parts are more prone to experiencing defects than others; for instance, if one web application, in particular, has many more defects than any others within your project it might need more experienced developers working on it than expected.
Ensure Your Feedback Justifies Your Stance
As part of an evaluation, give developers an explanation for any needed modifications rather than simply listing what must be changed or improved. Most problems you encounter during development will have multiple possible solutions, and your knowledge and experience should inform the comments you add to the code; your method might differ from that of its author's approach, thus necessitating justification of your coding decisions using words.
Say you are reviewing code and decide that multithreading is unnecessary; explain that its concurrent model doesn't offer any performance advantages in their scenario and that their code would benefit more by being written as a single thread rather than simply telling developers not to use threads.
This strategy offers two benefits. First, the author will understand why specific changes need to be implemented more easily in the future. Second, since your justification was provided before your remarks were discussed further with them, time is saved by not needing to probe further for answers about why something has happened or needs changing.
The Bottom Line
Staff augmentation has become an essential strategic imperative in 2023, not simply a tactical tactic. Staff augmentation allows companies to expand, hire specialized talent, and effectively control expenses. Applying best practices outlined here to maximize staff augmentation's potential and enhance company performance.
Agile software development necessitates code reviews as an integral component. By adhering to our best practices and following them code reviews can ensure the software you deliver meets high-quality standards without any ongoing maintenance requirements. Instead of conducting them sporadically when time allows, it is best practice to include code reviews as part of your development cycle and schedule them as early as possible.
