In today’s day and age, development leaders have great tools to help their teams ship the right things fast. So, what tools should you be using? Here's our 2024 Dev Leader Toolstack. While many tools are integrated across every part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), this stack focuses on tools dev leaders will use weekly to better manage their teams. Let's get to it! 

1) Software Development Lifecycle Tooling 

First up is your primary software development lifecycle tool. You should use this tool to track everything the dev team does, from epics down to individual tasks. It is essential to see who is doing what and what still needs to be completed. Smaller teams are tempted to avoid using SDLC tooling and instead will just "get things done," but this makes managing your process impossible. Take the mentality that if it's not in our SDLC tool, it didn't happen. 

Best in class: Atlassian Jira

Jira used to only be available as an overengineered and bloated system. However, the new cloud offerings give teams exactly what they need, and the ecosystem around Jira through the marketplace allows dev leaders to add functionality and reporting where needed. 

Alternative: Linear

What would happen if you could build SDLC tooling from scratch in the 2020s? You would get Linear. Positioned as the "new standard for modern software development," it's an excellent alternative that tech and startup companies prefer. 

Now that we know what the development function is working on, we need to manage the individuals and teams that make it up. 

2) Developer Management

We need standard and scalable ways to get developer feedback and keep track of individual progress. Without this, we cannot see the complete picture of our development teams. We miss leading indicators on issues and cannot understand how the team comes together, with each developer playing an important role. Productivity can come to a halt when a process or personal issue rears up. Tooling should support your culture of bottom-up feedback and a proactive management process. 

Best in class: DevClarity

Understand your developers better than ever before through developer profiles. Gather team feedback through dev-specific pulse checks. Set up a standard for one-on-ones and follow through with action items. Streamline proactive dev management to save time while effectively leading your team. 

Alternative: Excel + OneNote 

Something is better than nothing. You need to gather feedback and take one-on-one notes. Set up templates in OneNote and Excel for this. Retrieving information from these systems will be difficult, but you will have a process you can share with others. 

We finish our dev leader toolstack with better analytics around the productivity of our teams. 

3) Performance Management 

Through our SDLC tools, we get burndown and velocity charts. These are great for alarm-raising or sprint planning, but they do not do much to help us improve over time. We can integrate our SDLC tool into a performance management system to get more analytics on top of this data. A great example is DORA metrics, a set of four metrics to help measure team velocity and system stability. 

Best in class: Pluralsight Flow

Pluralsight Flow gives you workflow diagnostics and DORA tracking. Built to help teams commit more code, Pluralsight Flow will provide you with a suite of analytics from your existing SDLC data.  

Alternative: LinearB

Similar to Pluralsight Flow, LinearB starts with DORA and then creates additional active improvement reports and learning. LinearB also provides industry reporting to show where your team stacks up against other companies for particular metrics. 

In Summary 

In 2024, we should use the best tools to create the best software teams. This toolstack will help us deliver the right things fast. We should start with a foundational SDLC tool, add in developer management, and look to improve our understanding through performance analytics.