Unlocking KTLO Success in Software Development: A Leadership Perspective

Many technology and business managers will recognize this situation:

Business and marketing leadership want the development team to create an attractive feature or app to increase users and revenue. While ready to do this, the developers are focused on the details of and concerned about the quality of the existing software and the functionality of current or out-of-date infrastructure.

This tug-of-war over the human and material resources of a business’s tech team is common in many companies. Yet, it does not have to be the rule of business and developer relationships. Misunderstandings come from the different languages and priorities departments within a company speak. Still, they can find common ground on which to build effective communication that delivers desirable outcomes for all stakeholders.

The Enji team has years of experience applying the business goals of a project and a whole company to the realities of creating quality software and an engineering management platform. This article will share insights into the challenges and best practices in Keeping the Lights On (KTLO).

KTLO in software development refers to the ongoing maintenance and support of existing systems, ensuring they continue to function smoothly and meet user needs. Engineering teams are also focused on managing risks associated with new developments, such as security vulnerabilities. This includes fixing bugs, updating software dependencies, addressing performance issues, and handling security patches to prevent disruptions. Developers concentrate on balancing the demands coming from business leadership with the technical challenges. Without an effective policy, the lights turn off on software and products malfunction.

Simply put, neither business managers nor tech leaders want this to happen, but tensions arise given the constraints on businesses to do more with less. The Enji team recognizes these key challenges to KTLO in software engineering:

The era of cheap money has ended, meaning that software developers need to improve their professional and personal skills to remain in demand on a project and the job market. They face difficulties explaining to business stakeholders the necessity of acquiring and allocating certain resources in a way that may not seem immediately relevant to the business goals. This includes time, money, and human resources.

The resource issue can become more critical when there is a lack of trust between business and development teams. When neither group believes the other is interested in the company's goals or does not believe they contribute any value to the business, communication breaks down and no one wants to explain their needs to the other.

KTLO requires developers who can handle the range of issues and tasks they may encounter. A company must consider the finances involved in hiring and retaining these individuals.

To effectively manage tech debt and maintain quality software, individual developers and the team need to believe in the business and product goals. If their only focus and motivation is money, then it becomes difficult to convince them to devote energy to the tasks of KTLO. Developers need to not only work for the benefit of the company but should understand that the results they achieve are good for them as professionals.

Below are strategies that will help teams minimize the effect of the challenges above and, perhaps, avoid them altogether.

This involves defining stages of the KTLO process within an organization. First, teams must conduct planning that prioritizes the tasks they need to accomplish. This will identify critical needs and timeframes during which issues must be resolved. During the planning phase, teams will also consider available resources, including financial and human.

With a system in place, it will be easier to communicate with business stakeholders about the team's capacity to answer all their priorities without agreeing to everything and missing deadlines or creating more tech debt. The team can then allocate time and personnel to handling KTLO and creating new features.

Trust is necessary to develop an effective KTLO strategy. Part of the approach also involves building trust within the team. When an issue has been identified, tech managers need to break it down into specific tasks, describe them clearly, and then explain what they need to do to developers. This ensures that developers have all the information they need to succeed in their tasks, increasing their satisfaction and trust that their managers do not want them to fail.

Moreover, leaders can investigate the issues and study them to obtain an understanding of the source. When team members begin the task, they know who to approach with questions. Trust also comes from using software developer metrics as signals to find roadblocks and issues rather than the only way to measure developer performance and success.

Design recruitment and hiring processes that bring individuals whose goals and ideas are aligned with those of the company. Test their creativity and knowledge and learn their motivations. KTLO does not require highly experienced developers but rather those willing to learn and be challenged with new tasks.

The complex tasks involved in KTLO require engineers who are creative problem solvers and enjoy doing this kind of work. This means training younger professionals to increase their skill sets beyond their stack, giving them new and challenging tasks that will test their knowledge and push them to improve their professional competencies. They require enough independence to perform their work and make mistakes that will serve as lessons in the future. Investment also means trusting developers and speaking with them on a human level without excessive micromanagement. Likewise, supporting and retaining valuable and skilled employees through material and other forms of compensation are costs that will lead to better products and higher profits for the business.

At the heart of these strategies is the need for transparency and a desire to regularly review and adapt processes to changing conditions. This is easy to achieve, given all the data that individuals and teams create when performing their work. The Enji team believes in embracing data to develop better relationships and software.

The Enji team's adherence to transparency and data aligns with four principles of effective software development:

• Keeping things in order
• Disciplined processes
• Data-driven decisions
• Responsibility

The KTLO solutions described in this article intersect with these ideas because a systematic approach with a disciplined process to tech debt and maintenance ensures that teams keep things in order. Teams that trust data and make decisions on objective facts act responsibly and produce value for a business.

Enji exists to make these solutions achievable for all teams and to create a transparent environment with universal data collection across a project's activity:

• Individual coding metrics: See where each developer is performing well and where they require guidance.
• Team coding metrics: Know a team's rhythm and understand where the processes can be improved with signals that target effective approaches.
• Worklogs: Receive clear software developer business metrics on the time required for different tasks to optimize the planning process.

All stakeholders can receive access to this data in concise, text-based reports and summaries that deliver the information they need to see roadblocks and understand the details of engineering teams. Likewise, developers benefit from tools that help them build and follow disciplined processes:

• Asynchronous stand-ups: Team members submit written status checks according to the customized format a team needs. See updates and roadblocks for every person and project.
• Alerts and bots: Create reminders tailored to specific tasks and responsibilities that keep teams on track to completing goals and ensuring that tasks are completed.

The Enji team also embraces dogfooding and uses all these features to create a platform that delivers clients the value they deserve to create great software. Clutch.co is one client that has benefited from the data Enji provides.

The Clutch.co development team includes managers and developers located in different countries and time zones. This creates an understandable amount of challenges to effective communication and management, including planning and implementing KTLO policies. With Enji, though, the Clutch team has optimized their performance.

For example, using Enji's worklogs and analysis features, their team identified that more time was spent on communication than necessary. With this project management data, they cut those hours in half to allocate more attention to strategic tasks, such as KTLO.

As mentioned earlier, resource constraints can lead development teams to struggle with maintenance tasks and tech debt. Enji helps leaders find ways to save both time and money to create effective data-driven performance.

Enji is not KTLO software, but it gives leaders and business stakeholders the data they need to communicate priorities and plan realistic goals effectively. KTLO does not have to create misunderstandings between development teams and the business side of a company when transparency and responsibility drive the creation of policies.