The Modern Way of Sharing Dev Work With Your Team

Collaboration is essential in modern application development. To iterate quickly, an efficient way to show and receive feedback on changes from everyone across your organization is necessary. This includes not only developers, but also product, sales, marketing, and design teams.

In this article, we will examine how development teams traditionally share their work across the organization, the problems they encounter, and how switching to Okteto can solve these issues and unlock greater productivity for developers.

Problems With Current Methods of Sharing

Traditionally, if you're a developer who has just written code for your microservices-based application, getting feedback from someone can be a tedious process. Typically, it involves the following steps:

• Commit and push your code
• Wait for CI processes to ensure your code hasn't broken the application
• Your team member clones the code
• They build and run the application

Each of these steps takes time and slows down the inner development loop, making it difficult to receive fast feedback and iterate quickly. Additionally, these steps assume you're only seeking feedback from other developers. If you need to share changes with the design or product team, the process becomes even more complex, as they may not know how to build and run the application and even what environment to use for that.

So, how can we optimize for fast feedback loops and improve this process?

How Okteto Simplifies Sharing Changes and Getting Feedback

Okteto is a development experience platform that automates both the experience and the environment. Its goal is to simplify development and make collaboration a breeze when working on modern applications. When developing applications using Okteto, developers are provided with endpoints where they can access a version of the application deployed just for them, specifically for development purposes. Any changes they make to the code will be reflected live at these endpoints as soon as they hit save, without having to wait for a build or deployment process to complete. See it in action for yourself!

With Okteto, the complicated process of showing your changes gets reduced to just two steps:

1. Saving your work
2. Sharing the endpoint shown on your dashboard with any team member

This makes collaboration extremely simple, as these endpoints can be shared with anyone in your organization to give them a preview of what you’ve been working on and get feedback. The platform takes care of provisioning full-stack environments for everyone so nobody has to do any configuration or create any additional environments to see the changes.

Enable Sharing By Default in the Experience

Developers need to be provided with the right tools for development to make collaboration easier

Whether you are working on a small project with just a few team members or a larger project with dozens of developers, Okteto enables platform engineers to automate modern environments that make it easy for developers to share and collaborate as part of the development experience. This allows developers to get feedback from their peers and collaborate seamlessly.

In addition, Okteto provides a secure environment for sharing and collaborating across the entire software development lifecycle. Platform engineers can control who has access to these live endpoints, ensuring that their intellectual property is protected at all times. This is particularly important for sensitive projects where confidentiality is key.

Okteto doesn’t just simplify modern application development for developers, but also across the entire organization. With Okteto, platform engineers are able to introduce a platform that allows product, design, marketing, and sales teams to see the changes to the application developers are making in real-time, giving them better visibility into the development process and allowing them to provide timely feedback.

Preview Environments vs Endpoints – When To Use What

In addition to endpoints on the Okteto platform, Platform Engineers can also configure Preview Environments for their code repositories. While Endpoints enable developers to share each small change they make and receive feedback as soon as they hit save, Preview Environments, on the other hand, automatically create an environment for every Pull Request and provide a URL that anyone can use to view them. Each of them has its utility in different phases of development.

Endpoints are useful during the phase when developers are writing the code and want instant feedback from a person or team closely involved in the development of the feature they’re working on. Preview environments come into the picture when developers have completed working on a feature or bug fix and make a pull request. They are meant to provide a broader set of people visibility into what change is going to be merged in the application codebase. Another key difference between the two is that while Endpoints deploy only the code a developer has written when working, Preview environments deploy all the commits in a pull request regardless of who has made them. Preview environments have a broader scope and are meant to be used for feedback when a feature or bug fix is ready to be shipped, whereas endpoints are meant for instant feedback on small iterations developers might be making when they’re writing code.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Okteto provides a modern and fast way to share development work and collaborate with your team. Its endpoints make it easy for developers to see changes in real-time. The ability to share these endpoints enables seamless collaboration across the organization, including teams like sales, marketing, and design that traditionally got involved much later in the review process.

If you're looking for a better way to work with your team, give Okteto a try and see how it can improve your productivity and the speed of your team’s workflow!

Arsh SharmaDeveloper Experience Engineer / Emojiologist 😜View all posts