Automation is key to growing software development, execs say

Forty-six percent of software development executives see the need to up-level capacity with automation as a top concern. Tempo’s time management survey revealed that managing team capacity is a priority, and software development leaders are looking to automation to increase capacity and eliminate wasted time.

Not all companies track their developers’ and engineers’ time the same way, for the same reasons, and often still use spreadsheets to do so. Manually logging time requires developers to frequently stop work to record activities — a time sink throughout the day.

Every organization surveyed tracks the time developers spend on development projects. Since managing team capacity is a top priority, software development leaders are looking to automation to eliminate mundane tasks that waste developer time. Top-of-mind issues surrounding IT and software development talent include: wasting time on mundane tasks that don’t deliver value (56%), needing to up-level capacity with automation (46%), using legacy processes that are not reflective of today’s tech landscape (42%), and lacking talent or capacity needed to complete necessary tasks (39%).

Nearly half of the organizations surveyed (44%) track time daily, while another 44% track time weekly. The high frequency with which surveyed organizations track time indicated a need to have a clear view of how time and effort are being invested — and a need to make tracking time seamless in order to save, not spend, time every day.

Organizations are looking to automation to increase capacity and save time. While the majority of respondents (79%) already augment development and engineering work with automation tools for faster decision-making purposes, this has not fully extended to how time is tracked. One-third (34%) of respondents still track time manually with spreadsheets, with the remaining two-thirds using either internally developed tools (41%) or time tracking software they have purchased (23%). An automated approach to time tracking has not reached the same level of adoption as other automated software development tools.

While many organizations have automated other aspects of software development, time tracking tends to still be done manually. In order to perform at top capacity, organizations need to have a thorough understanding of how time is being spent, so they can augment and adjust as needed to really optimize time and results.

Tempo recently surveyed 800 organizations from the U.S. and Europe and found software development leaders are most concerned with capacity, and are looking to automation to eliminate mundane tasks that waste developers’ time.

Read the full report by Tempo.