Developer Visibility: Where, When, and Why Now
As developer pressure mounts and calls for better software quality get louder, end-to-end visibility has become crucial. It’s time to provide visibility to software development teams everywhere.
– SmartBear CEO Frank Roe
There’s one inarguable result of the rapid acceleration of business demands, consumer expectations, and an endless, growing list of innovative technologies in the software industry – immense pressure felt by development teams across the globe.
Current economic challenges and financial uncertainties are putting business leaders under increased pressure as well. This has led to an urgent, “all hands on deck” requirement for businesses to uncover opportunities to increase top-line growth and to reduce costs.
We believe it’s time to do more to help development teams shorten the path to great software, and to give business leaders greater confidence in the positive impacts that software will make in the market.
What does “doing more” look like? It starts with visibility.
Visibility Provides ‘Essential Context’
While no single role should entirely “own” software quality, developers today shoulder a greater responsibility for quality and perform more testing and testing-related activities than in the past. This shift has resulted in fewer manual handoffs and increased efficiencies, but it’s also resulted in less time in the day to do what many developers love more than anything – writing new code.
When customer expectations increase, business demands accelerate, and developers are often left with less confidence in being able to meet those demands, or less confidence in the quality of the code that just went out the door.
Every business wants to accelerate the production of innovative software and digital services. The key to not only accelerating, but accelerating with confidence, is what we call “developer visibility.”
Developer visibility encompasses a portfolio of capabilities that give development teams unprecedented visibility across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). Visibility into areas for greater optimization, and visibility into risky blind spots that threaten performance, stability, and user experience.
Developer visibility provides teams with essential context that enables more effective problem solving. By accelerating your ability to identify the root cause of bugs, you gain actionable insights that help you accelerate their resolution.
Lastly, since the SDLC doesn’t end when code is deployed to production, developer visibility doesn’t either. SmartBear solutions give you greater confidence in the quality of your deployed code, but also real-time observability that enables teams to identify, prioritize, and quickly debug the errors that matter most.
Developer Visibility = Business Visibility
When development teams are given greater visibility throughout the entire SDLC, business leaders are given greater visibility into the health of their entire organization. If “every company is a software company,” then every company is 100% dependent on the software they provide to be of the highest possible quality and to provide the best possible user experience.
Along with the benefits throughout the SDLC that are listed above, developer visibility provides business leaders with competitive differentiators like:
- The ability to continuously release innovative features that customers want and need
- An accelerated time to market
- Greater confidence in software quality and reduced risk
- Increased, streamlined collaboration between traditionally and/or geographically siloed teams
- Improved user experiences from products and brands that instill trust and customer loyalty
More than 16 million software professionals leverage SmartBear solutions to help them develop, test, and continuously deliver high-quality software to their customers. Developer visibility is what gives development teams, business leaders, and their customers the confidence that each release can be even better than the last.