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How to Speed Up Software Development?

Why is Faster Software Development Important?

Faster software development is important because it saves time and money.

In a business world that is more competitive than ever before, it’s important to be able to develop software as quickly as possible. Today’s software developers need to be able to build out new features for the company’s product or service, and they need to do so quickly. The faster that this can happen, the less time is wasted, which means that companies will be more prepared and have a higher chance of success in this competitive market.

What Practices Will Help You Speed Up Your Software Development?

  1. Shift Left through Automation
  2. Implement CI/CD
  3. Automate as many tasks as possible – coding, data entry, testing, etc.
  4. Make defects visible so they can be fixed early and often – unit testing, nightly builds, etc.
  5. Know what you want before you build it – are requirements clear? does the design make sense? are there risks or side effects we should know about?
  6. Do things in parallel wherever possible – running multiple tests, running multiple code reviews at the same time, etc.
  7. Be responsive to changes in requirements and design from stakeholders and teammates
  8. Limit your work in progress
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Mutation testing with Stryker

Test your tests with mutation testing.

What is mutation testing?

Bugs, or mutants, are automatically inserted into your production code. Your tests are run for each mutant. If your tests fail then the mutant is killed. If your tests passed, the mutant survived. The higher the percentage of mutants killed, the more effective your tests are.

It’s that simple.

Are you still confused? Why not take a look at our example page and try it out yourself?

But wait, what about code coverage?

Well… code coverage doesn’t tell you everything about the effectiveness of your tests. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a test without an assertion, purely to increase the code coverage?

Imagine a sandwich covered with paste. Code coverage would tell you the bread is 80% covered with paste. Mutation testing, on the other hand, would tell you it is chocolate paste and not… well… something else.

Meet: Stryker

Sounds complicated? Don’t worry! Stryker has your back. It uses one design mentality to implement mutation testing on three platforms. It’s easy to use and fast to run. Stryker will only mutate your source code, making sure there are no false positives.

Checkout this example which demonstrates why code coverage is not sufficient and why there is a need for tools like Stryker – https://stryker-mutator.io/example

Stryker is an open source tool. Give this a try: https://stryker-mutator.io/