Regardless of what type of software development process you’re talking about, collaboration is always one of the keys to success. This is especially true when you’re leveraging modern day tools like ephemeral environments. A deeply rooted sense of collaboration is necessary for development teams to, among other things, optimize their workflows across the board.
All told, there are a wide range of different best practices that you can leverage to do this, from establishing clear project goals to adopting flexible methodologies and more. But above all else, creating the most positive work culture that you can – one that promotes both communication and collaboration in equal measure – can significantly increase both efficiency and morale at the same time.
What are Ephemeral Environments?
But first, it’s important to make sure that you have a concrete understanding of what an ephemeral environment is to begin with.
An ephemeral environment is a temporary environment that can be automatically generated as-needed. They’re useful not only for testing and quality assurance purposes but also previewing features, collaborating across teams, and more.
Essentially, rather than doing work in a live production environment where one mistake could impact what someone else is doing, an ephemeral environment can be created. All necessary tests or other tasks can be carried out, information can be obtained, and then the environment can be struck before everything is rolled into the larger whole. It’s a far more efficient way to work in general, especially with larger applications where different teams are working on their own sets of features and tasks simultaneously.
Collaboration in Ephemeral Environments: An Overview
By far, one of the most important ways to increase collaboration in an ephemeral environment has to do with setting clear, actionable goals at the outset of the project.
One of the major benefits of ephemeral environments is that they’re versatile – by acting as temporary environments that can be created quickly and easily, they can be used in a lot of different ways by a lot of different people. That flexibility is hugely beneficial, provided that people still have guidance from team leaders about how and why they should be used.
In essence, if left unchecked, there may be a possibility where ephemeral environments are used in a way that only further cements the silos that are often created during software development. Team leaders still need to be actively involved in what people are doing on a daily basis to be sure that tools like ephemeral environments are being used to their fullest potential. The users want to get to this point, to be clear – it’s just that sometimes, especially when you’ve transitioned to this tool from older processes, they may lack the direction to get there on their own.
Another way to increase collaboration in this context involves adopting flexible methodologies, with Agile being chief among them. Ephemeral environments are great in general, but the best way to leverage all of their various advantages is to make sure that processes are in place elsewhere within your teams to actually support them.
The Agile methodology by its nature, for example, helps increase visibility in the development process – both in terms of allowing teams to see what others are doing, and with regard to allowing team leaders to keep an eye on progress moving forward. This helps to dramatically increase the alignment of one team to the next, even if everyone is working on their own list of things to do.
This in turn increases adaptability significantly, both with regard to individual teams and in the context of the larger whole. Indeed, this almost instantly creates an environment where the conditions support and empower a deeply rooted sense of collaboration like never before.
Of course, these flexible methodologies have other long-term benefits, too. By embracing conditions that decrease risk and increase collaboration, it almost always has a positive impact on product quality. This increases customer satisfaction, which goes a long way towards improving the business value of the software development process as much as possible.
Finally, conducting code reviews as early on in the process as possible (not to mention as often) is a great way to increase the efficiency at which team members are able to collaborate. Indeed, one of the major benefits of ephemeral environments in general is that it allows for easy testing in real-time as the development process goes on. Not only does this allow someone to test a feature before it is rolled into the larger application, but it also helps empower a more thorough “peer review” process as well.
Because an ephemeral environment can be rapidly created, others can be given access to see what team members are up to and offer both reviews and feedback in a far faster way than most are traditionally used to. This allows bugs to be fixed faster and changes to be incorporated easier, at which point the environment can be struck just as quickly as it was erected.
In the End
Overall, it’s important to remember that not all software development teams are created in quite the same way. That is to say, there is no “hard and firm” way to increase collaboration in something like an ephemeral environment. You need to let the makeup of your team dictate the direction you should take – leverage what works from those best practices outlined above and don’t be afraid to come up with some of your own should you deem it necessary. That’s ultimately the best way to increase collaboration and efficiency in the most organic way possible moving forward.
