Delay or pay: When poor developer velocity slows your product roadmap

Those 26,275 lines of code have multiplied. And even with eight developers, 16.2 months work has crept to 22.5 and then 28.6, so the $1,178,921 development budget has exploded. All that… to build just one new feature, for a rich text editor.

Gary Oak*, VP of Engineering at InGen, is worried. The development timeline has repeatedly blown out, and he’s not exactly sure where things went wrong. Although, perhaps it was a single decision taken, at the very start. That was, to take on a project outside his dev team's core specialization – building a Rich Text Editor (RTE) clean copy-paste feature – and expecting it to be easy.

Every project hits a critical point, where you realise you’ve not leveraged your developer talent, scope-creep continues to grow, and the company launch window and revenue are in jeopardy.

“All we wanted was to control the development process, and now we’re dangerously close to not reaching our quarterly revenue projection, for the third consecutive month,” said Oak. In hindsight, perhaps the agility offered by buying and assembling some specialist components for their tech stack, instead of building it all, would have been a wiser choice.

In specialized fields like rich text editors, an inexperienced in-house development approach often adds uncertainty to the scoping equation. Then costs increase when teams get side-tracked on building deep user features, or the requirements transform due to a market change and user preference. Scope creep expands. Again. And again.

In the end, speed-to-market suffers and time is money.

Empowering your team adds developer velocity

Software development is now at the core of almost every business.

According to a 2020 McKinsey report on developer velocity, “With technology powering everything from how a business runs to the products and services it sells, companies in industries ranging from retail to manufacturing to banking are having to develop a range of new skill sets and capabilities. In addition to mastering the nuances of their industry, they need to excel first and foremost at developing software.”

Or do they? No, they don’t.

Leading digital organizations use a different approach. They’re shaping a new set of principles for scoping, procuring, renewing, and operating their digital assets. By assembling a plastic, not static, tech stack.

This decision is particularly relevant when considering whether to buy or build a rich text editor.

Buy vs build was once a singular question. It’s now become two-part: “What out-of-the-box software components can we selectively buy, integrate, and assemble to create a flexible software stack? and “Where does our development expertise and true market need lie, to build the rest?”

When you’re considering buy vs build, you need to factor in that a rich text editor is like a complicated Swiss watch with many unseen parts that work in synchrony, so it’s never a once-and-done project. It requires deep domain knowledge and year-round maintenance – to keep up with browsers, edge cases, and changes in technologies.

That requires ongoing investment, maintenance and extensibility work. Without developer velocity, your cost projections and timelines continue to blow out.

What is developer velocity and what’s it deliver?

Developer velocity occurs when developers are equipped with the right tools, in the right environment and friction points are removed – so they can then innovate in their areas of core talent. It also minimizes barriers to productivity, so it takes a critical role in the agile approach, by driving business performance.

It allows your developers to build on the shoulders of specialist experts.

After their first velocity study, in late 2020 McKinsey conducted further research (in partnership with Github and HashiCorp) and found a clear link between “unleashing the full potential of developers and business success.”

Along the way, McKinsey created the Developer Velocity Index (DVI), “...a holistic measure of a company's software development capabilities that pinpoints the most critical factors (related to technology, working practices, and organizational enablement) for software excellence. [...] companies in the top quartile of Developer Velocity Index scores outperformed bottom-quartile peers by up to five tims on their 2014-2018 revenue growth.”

It was noted that organizations with developer velocity in the top quartile achieve:

The research also showed “that best-in-class tools are the top contributor to business success – enabling greater productivity, visibility, and coordination. [...] The underinvestment in tools across the development life cycle is one reason so many companies struggle with “black box” issues.”

World-class tools empower developers

McKinsey’s research has proven that best-in-class tools are the primary driver of developer velocity.

“Leading companies also use tools to unleash Developer Velocity by investing in low-code and no-code platforms. These platforms enable the average business user to develop applications without any software experience, freeing up seasoned developers to focus on the most challenging tasks.”

Those businesses are getting better at leveraging their existing software engineering talent, which allows them to move faster, build more new products, and tap into new and emerging trends.

However, there are still those who believe the true problem is not having enough developers on their team. That's wrong. It’s how developers are being leveraged and supported. Failing to deploy the best talent on the right project is repeatedly becoming the biggest threat to a company’s digital transformation and market success.

Slow developer velocity is an even bigger threat to success than access to capital.

According to a recent report by payment platform Stripe, “As technology fracks into every aspect of the world economy, software engineers are becoming one of the world’s most precious resources. While businesses today face myriad issues – security vulnerabilities, trade tariffs, complex government regulations, increased global competition – how they deploy their developers may be the most overlooked factor impacting their future success.”

The report goes on to name developers as the ‘force-multipliers’, who when deployed effectively, “have the collective potential to raise global GDP by $3 trillion over the next ten years.”

Future-facing businesses are leveraging their existing software engineering talent, so they can move faster, build new products, and tap into new and emerging trends.

Open source and Cloud adoption offer alternate accelerators

While buying specialist components offers one approach to assembling a flexible tech stack, so too does open source software and Cloud adoption.

The Mckinsey data showed that “...top-quartile company adoption of open source, has three times the impact on innovation as compared with companies in other quartiles. Top-quartile DVI companies are especially active adopters, scoring 36 per cent higher in open source adoption than the next quartile.”

Utilizing an open source core like TinyMCE – that has components your dev team can use as a framework for customization – and supporting it with a professional team and advanced features can offer the best of both worlds.

Which also means you don’t need to scour the world for rock-star experts in rich text editing to deliver your project ontime.