In the software development world, there are a ton of ways to get your project live—it’s just that some are more labor intensive than others. For example, when you code from scratch every time, it naturally takes longer to complete projects. But on the other hand, if you automate everything, then you’re wasting your talent. You have to find that perfect balance; a balance that enables you to automate the supporting elements of a project and leaves room for you to do what you do best: code.

Whether you develop solo, on a team, for a client, or for yourself, make sure your method allows you to show off your dev chops but also doesn’t require you to reinvent the wheel. Not sure whether your method fits that criteria? Let’s talk about the pros and cons of some common development methods and you can decide where you fall now—and where you want to be in the future.

Method 1: No man is an island...except you

You’re a solo developer. You probably have tons of industry experience and have branched off to be a freelancer or consultant and do your own thing. Maybe you even code for fun. You work from home—in a comfortable, secluded work environment—where you have full control of your projects, schedule, and rates. It’s pretty ideal, right?

Well, no, not quite. In fact, having full control of your projects has one major setback: it requires a lot of time and energy. You have many responsibilities, from lead developer to project manager, meaning you have to figure out what exactly your clients want on top of developing, testing, and deploying every piece of new software from start to finish.

And, let’s face it: you might not be an expert at everything you have to do. That’s why you like to try out tools that are designed to simplify certain processes. Unfortunately, you’ve found that most productivity tools help in one area but lack in others.

Since you don’t have to share code with anyone, you tend to code from scratch. While it might be satisfying, coding from scratch is also time consuming and could force you to sacrifice your free time to meet deadlines. Not to mention there’s no one you can lean on to review your code, track changes, or unit test it.

Overall, you’re happy with the freedom you have to be creative with your code, you’re just not getting great ROI!

Method 2: Spotless, seamless, and kind of stressful

As a front-end developer that works on a team, you enjoy the opportunities to collaborate, share ideas, and, most importantly, learn from teammates with specialties different than your own. You realize software development is an ever-changing field, so you like to stay up to date by reading industry related blogs, magazines, and books.

You know automation is important, if not essential, to the success of your product. With the ability to delegate tasks and split the work evenly between team members, you wouldn’t think there would be many downsides to working on a team.

But there are a couple of issues that keep popping up:

You manage several projects at once with tight deadlines, and when things get busy your workflow can easily become sloppy and inefficient. As a result, you sometimes rush to release a product on time, but it ends up full of bugs that require lots of backtracking to fix.

Another challenge of working on a team is communication. Not only between team members, but between you, the product manager, and leadership. To solve this, you’re probably already using tools to help you streamline workflow, collaboration, and communication—but having to manually link them to each project is a pain.

To make your process perfect, you need two things: a way to streamline projects so that multiple deadlines are easier to manage, and a simpler way to keep everyone on your team apprised of progress.

Method 3: Automation where it counts

The best software development process is one that allows developers to put their talents to use, while cutting out the stuff they shouldn’t need to focus on.

Flowt is the tool you need to make that possible.

Flowt is an opinionated front-end continuous delivery tool that utilizes DevOps best practices. It has built-in decision-making to let you focus on coding instead of administrative tasks. Its visual pipeline offers multiple role options so everyone on your team, whether they know code or not, can stay up to date on progress. And to make things even easier, Flowt integrates seamlessly with all your favorite services like GitHub, Digital Ocean, Cloudflare, Slack, and Ghost Inspector.