Proven Techniques to Boost Project Visibility

Hello, there!

Welcome to Tech Forward, Vinta Software's newsletter. 

My name is Flávio Juvenal . I'm the Chief Scientist at Vinta. From now on, I will bring you some valuable insights I've learned as a leader in the software development industry.

After 10 years of building software across different industries, I have some valuable lessons to share that might resemble what you've been experiencing in your own projects.

I will start by asking: Do you have visibility of your developers’ work?

Visibility: From Top-Down to Bottom-Up

Pluralsight recently released a study on how visibility improves engagement, performance, and productivity in software development teams.

Their research showed there is major room for improvement  — 90% of IT leaders believe that making teams’ work visible was a key part of their job, but only 24% of developers thought their leaders and teammates had the right level of visibility into their work.

So, how can you enhance the visibility of your team's work for various stakeholders? Also, how do you let on just the right amount of visibility to your team but still shield away unnecessary stress? 

We should always keep in mind that visibility is a two-way journey, going from:

• Top-down: when leaders share the business context and clarify goals with developers;
• Bottom-up: when developers communicate their engineering efforts to their leaders and teammates.

While increasing visibility in both directions might seem easy, Pluralsight research proved that many leaders fail at this endeavor. 

 So, I asked Amanda Savluchinske , one of our Senior Managers at Vinta, to explore the visibility challenge and tell us more about how she solved it. You can check the full article by clicking here.

Before we delve into that, I'd like to share a recent challenge we faced at Vinta. One of our clients was in the process of acquiring a smaller competitor, but to finalize the deal, they needed assurance that their platform could handle the increased user load. 

Scaling software is a complex endeavor, but we embraced the opportunity. We had some challenges with horizontal scaling. In our upcoming issue, I'll delve deeper into our approach to overcoming this obstacle.

Scaling Software Challenges – We Want to Hear From You!

In the meantime, I'm curious: Which of the following challenges have you encountered in your recent experiences with scaling software? 

Let us know your thoughts on the comments. Your insights are invaluable and will guide our upcoming discussions.

1. Difficulties in effectively distributing workload across multiple servers or nodes (Horizontal Scaling)
2. Dealing with the complexities of dividing and distributing data across multiple database instances (Data Partitioning and Sharding)
3. Managing cache consistency and invalidation in distributed environments (Cache Consistency)
4. Addressing network latency and communication overhead in distributed systems (Network Latency and Communication Overhead)

See you next time!