Most successful Software Engineers are able to manage their time well. It will allow you to grow in your career more swiftly without having to spend lengthy hours towards the end of a sprint.
With automation pipelines, better IDEs, and DevOps, every firm is attempting to eliminate waste and increase efficiency. Avoid these top 6 time wasters to stay ahead of the game and make your day more productive.
Do's and Don'ts for Software Engineer - Top 6
1. Creating Systems from the Scratch
It would take a long time to accomplish a single project if a developer had to custom-code a JDBC database connection every time they constructed a web app.
Your top objective should be to create software that is easy to maintain and secure. That does not, however, imply that systems must be built from the ground up. You don't have to start from scratch and rebuild functionality that already exists.
Companies expect efficient work, and the time you spend creating a system from the ground up is usually unnecessary. Instead, use frameworks to build on pre-built functionality and tailor it to the client's requirements.
Check any existing corporate code databases as well. Whether the tool already includes features that overlap with the one you've been allocated, see if a function call can provide the information you need or if it can be incorporated.
When dealing with sensitive data such as financial or health information, however, it is logical to create features from the ground up to improve security. In most circumstances, though, frameworks, well-known open-source libraries, or premium plugins would suffice.
2. Including Too Many Options
How many times have you overcomplicated a storey need by considering all the possible outcomes? What if the API you're working on could be built to smoothly interface with other platforms? What if your dashboard could generate reports on its own?
Don't give in to the temptation. Don't overcomplicate it. Spending a lot of time on features that are too far in the future is a bad idea. Furthermore, more code implies more flaws, and needless scripts contribute to the bulk of an application. It will be more difficult to understand your code and add new functionality.
To avoid this, keep asking yourself if your code is meeting the story's precise requirements. Make sure you consider all of the use cases and edge circumstances, but don't waste weeks on a feature that might have been released much sooner.
Bring it up at the next sprint meeting if you're unsure about adding a feature that could perhaps solve an extreme use case. You'll save a lot of time and gain a reputation as a team player in the process.
3. Repeatedly Writing the Same Scripts
To be more productive as a software developer, you should follow the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) philosophy. This can be accomplished in one of two ways: by removing redundancy in your code or by optimizing your development procedures.
Let's look at how to deal with both of these cases.
(i) Code Redundancies:
The identical scripts and procedures must be written several times while setting up a server or even a virtual environment. You'll use nearly the same methods and code to establish your 4-tier development architecture with dev, test, staging, and prod environments. Furthermore, controlling infrastructure dependencies has gotten more difficult. Not only is it tedious and monotonous, but doing it by hand also exposes you to human mistake.
With reusable abstraction-based components and visual drag-and-drop interfaces, low-code platforms provide this functionality out of the box. Of course, there aren't one-click answers for every circumstance, but you'll be covered for the most common and repeated ones. Build, reproduce, and scale the code for as many environments as you need with automated pipelines.
(ii) Process Redundancies:
Outline the amount of steps you take in the development process and consider how you might cut them down. Here, automation is your ally.
Additionally, keep an eye out for processes that you repeat more than twice. Making an automatic sequence that can be triggered every time you wish to execute that task would be beneficial.
Always keep the time tradeoff in mind before going through with automation. Before automating anything, you should ask yourself the following questions: Will automating this save me more time than doing it manually? Will I be doing this on a regular basis for the next few weeks? Automate it if the answer is yes. Time waste should be minimized (and headaches).
4. Code Optimization Errors
This is a rather typical time waster that is often difficult to detect right away. You spend a lot of time optimizing code for use cases that aren't particularly important or even required.
Your main attention should be on getting the feature to work before considering optimization. However, don't establish unrealistic goals for yourself. The majority of optimization decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.
Do it if it will only take a few minutes to improve your performance. However, byte-level optimization is rarely necessary in most commercial situations. Is it useful? Yes. If getting that 1% increase in performance is going to take you hours, it's probably best to talk to the stakeholders first.
Assume you're working on a web page for a company's internal staff. If the website loads in under a second, you don't need need it to load in 0.5 seconds. That isn't going to significantly improve corporate operations. If it's an e-commerce business, though, getting it to load in under a second rather than two will be a functional need.
Getting regular input from your consumers is the best method to combat this time waste. Instead of constructing your own, you should optimize based on their severe use cases.
5. Ineffective Testing Strategy
When deciding between automation and manual testing, there is a fine balance to be struck. So, as a software engineer, let's look at how you might use this to devise an effective testing approach.
It's simple to construct a manual test to confirm that the new feature you added is functional. When you scale, though, performing those manual tests takes additional time away from the office, especially when you're looking for that annoying problem that keeps breaking your code.
If your application or website has a lot of components, the odds of you forgetting to conduct a test rise. This can be avoided by using automated testing or even a system to execute tests more efficiently.
You'll have to put in a little more effort to set up your automated testing. They can, however, be reused and activated as soon as you make any code modifications once they've been written. As a result, simply because you added a new function, you don't have to manually re-test existing ones.
Choosing the correct jobs to automate, on the other hand, is equally vital. Unfortunately, this is one of the most typical QA automated testing blunders. It's easy to slip into the trap of over-automating things and wind up manually reproducing tests. This is a huge waste of time because figuring out why your complicated automation didn't work is still a very manual process - exactly what you wanted to avoid.
Don't make things any more difficult than it needs to be. Instead, concentrate on simple test cases while ignoring uncommon or difficult jobs with numerous dependencies. You'll save a lot of time if you optimize and plan your test strategy before you start writing unit test cases.
6. Ineffective Communication
Many of the time-wasters in software development, some of which have been listed on this list, are caused by ineffective communication.
Individual team members work on distinct product features, which eventually becomes input for the QA team, and lastly a finished product for the end-user.
Communication is essential, particularly during the development and transition stages. Consider a scenario in which the developer misunderstands the story's business requirements. This communication gap might cause the solution to become overly complicated, resulting in technical errors and an increased risk of faults or reworks.
This time waste cannot be completely eliminated because communication is the most human component of software development. It can, however, be significantly decreased with the use of effective project management tools and a collaborative environment. Friction can be reduced using tools like Trello or Microsoft Teams.
When you're in a meeting or working on a feature, always keep the wider picture in mind. Learn how to successfully listen and collaborate. Make it a practise to write down or send a summary of what was discussed in the meeting to ensure that all parties are on the same page.
Also, communicate as soon as possible. Don't make assumptions about requirements, and give a tiny demo before working on the complete project if at all possible.
Finally the Do's
The trick is to make avoiding these time-consuming activities a habit. Short-term productivity 'tricks' will only get you so far. However, solid coding habits and self-awareness will aid in your efficiency. Be aware of where you spend the most of your time and make an effort to lessen it, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a good Software Engineer!
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