How to use data in a software development company?

[RealDreams]

I guess @ChrisV can help.
Edit: just realized it's an old post that got bumped.

 

[Rincewind]

Hi forum,

I run a podcast and I interview CEOs with the question "What is digitization and how will it affect your business"? I run a software development company and we create IoT products for small and medium businesses in germany.

Today I interviewed a professor who leads an institute for world economics and he gave me a very insightful definition for digitisation. (I hope that my translation is adequate, my podcast is german).

In the past there were not so many data sources AND they were not connected. Today we can generate as much data as we want and s fast as we want AND we can transmit it as fast as we want. This change affects all industries, even if they did not realise it yet. So his suggestion for any existing business today is:

1. Reflect how you provide value to your customers
2. Find out how the usage of data can improve your current business
3. Find partners to collaborate / how can you integrate into other services or integrate services yourself?

When I think of my clients this makes sense and I can think of many fancy ideas how to improve my clients businesses with data. BUT: I have no idea how I could improve my own business with data. We develop a product for our clients and get paid for that. Of course we use modern tools, agile development and all these buzzwords, but I don't have I product myself.

Any ideas? I know that many of you develop software yourself. How could you improve your software development by integrating data?

 

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[Odysseus M Jones]

When I think of my clients this makes sense and I can think of many fancy ideas how to improve my clients businesses with data. BUT: I have no idea how I could improve my own business with data.

I'm not sure if this is what you mean but you could use data from your clients on how your products improved their business to sell more of your product to new clients.

 

[Deleted78083]

In your case, it is all about your customers and the market needs. I guess a quick survey on your product performances would be a good start.

 

[JohnForte]

Any ideas? I know that many of you develop software yourself. How could you improve your software development by integrating data?

As someone that works with enterprise-level companies on CI / CD pipelines, they are really after the output from developers and the quality. As well as giving base points for estimations of a task.

They usually start with unit test and code coverage, they will produce a nice graphic on your pull request so senior developers as a glance can see how quality is your code beside just looking at it.

Then you have JIRA or issue tracking to determine how a team or group is outputting, are they output is slowing down or speeding up. Is it because they are given smaller task or is the team just grooving. As well as producing nice graphics for leaderships to view their teams' output. As well as how many releases from a Jira perspective were successful, not major bugs on launch and how many were failures. Like a complete outage of the product.

That is really the only two direct data on software development. Again both are rabbit holes and you can spend years perfecting them.

 

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