Every team has a workflow, even if it’s chaotic or lacks consistency. It’s a no-brainer, though, that in the fast-paced world of software development, a clear and well-defined path to guide your work is essential to move efficiently. Workflows provide just that — the structure and framework that developers need to streamline their processes, collaborate effectively, and optimize productivity.

If you want to make software engineering easy to improve, then automate actions in your development process. These simple yet high-impact “if this, then that” conditions pack a punch toward reducing toil and cognitive load. Your developers choose what’s important to improve and reap the benefits of an efficient and optimized development environment.

Smart notifications and nudges are table stakes tools for developers looking to streamline their work and stay focused on building improvements. These automatic alerts are key to a more efficient workflow, freeing us from the burden of repetitive, overwhelming, and time critical tasks — aka, toil.

Every team has guardrails, whether you recognize them or not. They’re a form of automation that can have significant impact on your software development process and the people doing the work. They’re another way to give toil the boot and keep developers in the flow. We’ve made the case for engineering automation in a previous article; here’s how guardrails as automations ensure that agreed upon boundaries and ways of working are codified into team processes.

When you survey developers on how to improve engineering practices and their daily job experience, their answers invariably include getting rid of little annoying things - what's called toil. Toil is manual and repetitive tasks that waste your time. Toil is arguably worse than crisis, because a crisis is temporary and firefighting can feel rewarding when it's over. Toil is more like a death march - an insidious force that eventually leads to burnout.