‍As most developers know, their code doesn’t always behave as they expect it to and they’re not quite sure why. This is most apparent when it comes to debugging their software. In order to figure out what the problem is, developer teams must go through a very long process in order to get the data they need to understand the problem. This can involve unnecessary wait times, unproductive hours, and a lot of wasted resources.

Modern developers are under ever increasing pressure to deliver software applications to the business in record time. This means shorter development cycles and a push to have code production ready as early as possible. In addition, many development teams no longer throw the code over the metaphorical wall to be handled by operations and production support teams, but rather oftentimes own the entire end to end delivery chain.

They say that procrastination is the thief of time. In the world of software development, there are some additional “time thieves” that prevent our teams from developing new features or slow them down as they attempt to fix issues. As software engineers or R&D managers, we take it for granted that our teams spend a lot of their time waiting for compiling, testing, and deploying.

Develop fast, release, learn, repeat. That’s essentially the (not-so-secret) innovation formula, right? Most of us spend our time enhancing the products we have already released. We want to be innovative, releasing new features with the velocity of an unencumbered startup. Yet, we also have customers with quality expectations we need to meet. Guidance on shortening release cycles often centers on adopting agile (or similar) development methodologies. But most companies are already there.