Developers Are No Longer Just Writing Code

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I had the pleasure to be at the Atlassian Team 22 conference in Las Vegas, and I was thrilled to be there in person when Swimm was announced as an official Compass Integration Partner.

I will share that the opportunity to go to sessions and talk with colleagues about agile and DevOps, teamwork culture, open work management, transforming how teams collaborate and drive cultural change, what it means to be in an open software relationship, and discussions about why software is so important in today’s world was fantastic. 

Grabbing a few minutes here to share a bit about my takeaways from the weekend and what I’m bringing back to my team at Swimm.

The transformation of software teams

We’re watching it all unfold - the incredulous transformation of digital organizations and software teams impacting every corner of companies. Indeed, software teams are at the center and in every corner of our organizations. Developers are no longer just writing code. This is a huge moment and recognition for the industry, and we’re all happily on board. 

And here’s what we know: we know that software teams are at once developers, product managers, marketers, support, QA, tech writers, and support management. In our companies, it’s this growing team of individuals working together, and of course, the challenge is how to do it and nurture these individuals and teams to power the machine of your company.

Making tough decisions

We had our second birthday at Swimm last fall, and we’ve had to make tough decisions at pretty much every junction of the journey. On the dev tools front, we’ve had to pick and choose tools to effectively collaborate and drive the creation of Swimm’s platform. It was exciting to feel the impact of all of us at the Team 22 keynote address - understanding how crazy it is that software teams are using an average of 25 tools. It’s not that we’re shocked by this number. In fact, we’re living and struggling with the management challenges daily. But being together at the conference, you could feel the weight in the room of understanding the incredulous task of every single company needing to sync with so many products and individuals.

With that much support needed - managing and juggling so many tools at once - the impact has to be damaging and debilitating for your teams. 

So how exciting it is the fact that the shape of software teams is changing - and the tools that we are using are shifting. We are all so relieved that Atlassian has brought in 3rd parties to make order out of the chaos, tracking across the software development life cycle.

I am so pleased and deeply honored that Swimm is an official Compass Integration Partner. We are excited to enable development velocity, super-fast onboarding for new engineers, and cross-team collaboration in the Compass ecosystem. Both Compass and Swimm strive to make developers’ jobs easier by bringing knowledge and critical information on code and codebase structure to the forefront, enabling engineering organizations to operate with multiple services.
 

Collaboration is our lifeline

My biggest takeaway from Team 22 is that collaboration and dev tools do this important work - and this collaboration is our present and the future. We need to prioritize streamlining collaboration - it’s the lifeline of our companies.

This is why we built Swimm. Because we know that developer and engineering teams need to collaborate to create code-coupled documentation to never ever allow onboarding, knowledge silos, or context switching to get us off track and slow us down.  

With springtime in full bloom, cheers to all that’s ahead. May all the seeds that we’ve planted sprout - growing partnerships and tools for the long run - to improve discoverability, collaboration, and developer happiness.