Increase your software engineers’ productivity

Writing and producing software is expensive. While learning software development is getting easier every day, delivering production-ready software in a timely manner remains a challenge.

What are the main software development costs?

Developing software does not require any hardware investments, besides a laptop. In general, producing and operating software incurs the following costs: the cost of developing the initial version of the software the cost of maintaining the software the cost of operating the software

The cost of operating the software is decreasing every year. Cloud computing platforms are more efficient and reduce prices regularly. It makes the operating cost low, compared to the cost of actually producing and maintaining software.

The real cost of operating software relies on the cost of software developers. Developing and maintaining the software are the most cost-intensive aspects. The initial version of an application represents between 10 and 30% of the total cost of ownership. And the maintenance efforts represent 50% of 70% of that cost.

What is the cost of a software engineer?

The average salary of a software developer is more than $110,000 per year (source). However, many top engineers receive a salary of more than $350,000 which comes with additional stock options. This is what makes software development a very costly endeavor.

Some advocates and project managers may recommend hiring engineers with lower salary expectations. This may impact the project quality and incur rework later (and ultimately, increase the total development cost).

While there’s nothing you can do about the rising cost of skilled labor, making your current software engineers more productive is a good approach. It does not require lowering salary expectations and does not reduce your monthly costs. Increasing developer productivity simply makes your engineers get more things done for the same cost. It lowers the overall software development cost by developing software and shipping code in production faster.

How to increase developer productivity?

There are different approaches to increasing developer productivity.

The first approach is to avoid wasting developers' time and resources. One common waste of developers' time is having too many meetings. Cutting back meeting time can be a good productivity boost for engineers: it lets them focus on what matters most.

The second approach is to use tools that will boost developers' productivity, either individually or in a group. Good tools include collaboration tools such as JIRA, GitHub, or a good IDE such as JetBrains.

Better collaboration across engineers

One common struggle software engineers face is the ability to collaborate and share good practices. For example, sharing best practices within a team is very useful, especially for code being used by different engineers. It’s no secret that many developers look for code snippets online and end up copying/pasting code from websites like StackOverflow. A more efficient approach is to enable developers of a team to share their own best practices internally.

Our Coding Assistant bridges that gap. It allows engineers to share best practices within their team and make them available directly within the engineer's environment. Sharing best practices in a team and making it easily searchable saves countless hours of engineering time. The math is simple: such a tool saves 5H of engineering time every month, which saves a company $3,000 per developer per year on average).

Better software documentation

Oftentimes, developers are searching for patterns and examples in an existing code base. They waste hours looking for code to reuse, and too often, find outdated code or even worse, code that does not match what they were looking for. While such information should normally be documented, software documentation is (too often) outdated.

By allowing developers to create and share Smart Code Snippets with their team and directly in their IDE our Coding Assistant helps software engineers find relevant code snippets that can save them countless hours in the long run. Engineers can find the right Smart Code Snippet for their task by searching by name, keywords or tags assocaited with a particular code snippet.. Instead of searching for code in a repository for hours, developers can then find the code they need in seconds on the Codiga Hub. The Codiga Hub houses all public Smart Code Snippets that have been added and vetted by other users on our network. Smart Code snippets can be found and favored, meaning they will populate in your IDE in seconds when commanded to.

Note that Coding Assistant aslo acts as a personal code snippet manager, allowing users to add and store their own Smart Code Snippets directly in their working enviromnt that can be shared publicaly, privately or with a team.

Do you want to try the Codiga Coding Assistant for your team? Sign up for free on codiga.io, and download the VS Code plugin or the JetBrains plugin.