Life Cycle Explorer: Remediate Bottlenecks, Unlock Process Obstacles & Improve Trends Throughout the SDLC

Developing software is hard. The modern software development life cycle is demanding, non-linear, and increasingly complex. A lot of work goes into shipping value to customers, and actually writing code is only a piece of the puzzle.

Engineering teams must define and refine the requirements of the code, write and test the code itself, collaborate, review and improve the code, and deploy it before any of it can be delivered as value to customers.

To do this in a timely and streamlined way, modern software development teams and their leaders need to visualize, break down, and understand their development life cycles. They need to identify and remediate bottlenecks, unlock process obstacles, and improve trends through the full life cycle of software development.

Enter Life Cycle Explorer from Jellyfish.

Meet Life Cycle Explorer

Jellyfish’s Life Cycle Explorer (LCE) gives engineering teams the ability to dive deeper – to expose and investigate the root cause of slowdowns, bottlenecks and process breakdowns.

Here’s how:

The Four Phases of Life Cycle Explorer

LCE shows how a team’s software development process operates across four phases:

1. Refinement
2. Work
3. Review
4. Deployment

LCE operates as an event-driven model, using a combination of Jira and Git data. When an issue progresses through your Jira workflow, LCE categorizes the work effort into one of these four phases. Phases are determined by when the first event and last event in any given phase occurs, with specific events representing specific phases.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the details of each phase.

1. Refinement

Refinement represents the ideation and planning component of your software development life cycle. It reflects the period between issue creation and the status of that issue changing to “in progress” or your initial code commit – whichever comes first.

An efficient Refinement process means your Product/Planning and Engineering teams are in sync. Refinement bottlenecks can occur if:

• There are regular disagreements during the planning process
• There is friction during the hand-off between planning and functional teams
• The scope of a deliverable becomes unmanageable. This can lead to several potential issues, like engineer thrashing, burnout, and failure to deliver on planned work.

Types of refinement bottlenecks include:

Thrashing & Burnout

This is indicated by a large overlap between the Refinement and Work phases. It typically occurs when engineers are working on too many things at once. This could indicate:

• The Planning team is increasing scope and Engineering must then context-switch to address it.
• Or, the initial refinement work wasn’t adequate in addressing the full scope of work and the team has to play catchup.

This bottleneck often occurs when the hand-off from product to engineering is loosely defined, along with poor communication and expectation setting. If you see this in your Life Cycle Explorer, evaluate the process you have in place. Set clear, concise SLAs that both the product and engineering organizations agree to adhere to when scoping out and defining work.

Not delivering on planned work

This is indicated by a large gap between the Refinement and Work phases. This could indicate:

• The team is too ambitious in the overall planning strategy.
• You don’t have the resources you need.
• Or that your stakeholders are being too demanding, among other things.

In order to solve this bottleneck, you should evaluate your planning process. Be sure to set better expectations about what you can achieve with available resources. You might also hire more engineers to address all scope you’re planning in your software development life cycle.

Dive Deeper with Jellyfish Academy

To learn more about the additional phases of Life Cycle Explorer – Work, Review and Deployment – along with potential bottlenecks and solutions throughout each phase, Jellyfish customers can complete this course in the Jellyfish Academy here.

If you’re not yet a Jellyfish customer and would like more information on how Life Cycle Explorer can help unblock software development for your business, request a demo here.