How To Make Software Development Culture More Collaborative

Delegation. Collaboration. Code reuse. These are the terms that are not only for the open source communities but also fit perfectly for the inner source communities as well.

The more collaborative your in-house software developers are, the better they will succeed together. When your employees have the same way at work, it is then that harmony is also instilled in the organization. And harmony is what helps your organization take a step towards success.

You can build a collaborative culture within your software developers with several different approaches. And a good thing? Collaborative teams are seemingly increasing with each passing year.

Collaboration is perhaps the sole concept that helps to improve not one but three aspects of the workplace namely communication, productivity, and satisfaction.

In this article, you can read about the best practices that will help you develop a more collaborative culture in your software development department of the organization.

Be transparent

One piece of advice that all the leading experts will give you to promote collaboration in your organization is to be transparent with your employees and encourage them to be transparent with each other. Transparency is perhaps the base for the inner-source culture.

Make sure you are always sharing each and every piece of relevant information with your teams across different levels. Of course, you can always exclude the ones that require a high-level of security.

Also, your team should always be well-equipped with tools and processes that will help them build a better and stronger team. Your development team should always be well-sourced and guided by the leaders to make sure they are always headed in the right direction.

Integrate reliable digital tools

Digital tools are perhaps a blessing in disguise for organizations. It is these digital tools that help you either ease out the communication or make it convenient for you and your team to juggle multiple projects or simply track the time of your remote software developers. These tools are perfect to ensure transparency among the team and can help you devise your hierarchy easily.

For instance, take document collaboration software. This tool allows your teams to work together in the same document, irrespective of their demographics. This tool allows them to edit, re-word, contribute to, or simply over look the task that is being completed.

The goal of this tool is to create a final version of a document while encouraging collaboration.

Establish open communication

Communication is the key to success and it is communication that can easily be achieved with effective collaboration and vice versa.

Thus, you should consider facilitating open communication in your organization. This will help your software developers feel like they are truly a part of your organization and the chances of them to retain in the company will increase.

For this, you can always initiate by acknowledging their views, taking their inputs, and listening to each one of them reflectively.

Also, make sure you are always in search of innovative ways to engage with them individually with more touch of personalization to your interactions.

Distribute workload effectively

Overburdening an individual with work will only lead to them resigning off from their position. Moreover, when one person has all the work, you will hardly be able to integrate the culture of collaboration among employees. Thus, make it a habit to work across teams and hierarchies in order to evenly distribute the workload and also promote collaboration.

You can establish a team of decision-makers who can work on approvals and reviews to help teams stick to the standards of quality that you’ve set. Pair up teams from different departments to make it easier for them to reach each other.  For instance, pair up your technical writers with project engineers to document the code features precisely.

Conclusion

Collaborative culture can take your organization a long way. These practices will certainly help you climb the path to success.