Making a case for investing in software tools: convincing yourself, your team, and your boss

Introduction

Visual Assist has been a longtime partner for coding in Visual Studio. It adds missing features and sometimes even replaces the default features in the IDE. In fact, you can even argue that Visual Assist had a direct influence as to how some of the features in Visual Studio panned out.

But what makes Visual Assist (VA) such a compelling purchase? And what about it makes it a worthwhile software to continue using?

In this blog post, we share a story of how a small company that invested in VA a long time ago still remains staunch VA users despite numerous new alternatives available. Read on to find out what it is that keeps them renewing each year.

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We found Ryan, a user who was director at a small software company developing games. They were the type of person who wanted to make sure that his team (no matter how small) had access to the best tools and resources needed to deliver good quality in reasonable delivery time.

The key word here is reasonable. Their reasoning was that in order to create “high quality” work, they had to foster a working environment and workstation that made it easy to be productive. He didn’t feel obligated to have ultra high-end PCs, posh offices, or crazy setups but they did invest into software until work felt easy and frictionless.

For Ryan, a frictionless workstation means that they had access to sophisticated enough tools that allowed them to focus on innovating and problem solving. They had built a reliable set of software: modeling tools, profilers, code analyzers, and coding assistants that made work comfortable—they didn’t have to do things 100% manually, they had tools smart enough to minimize their actions, and they could automate simple and repetitive tasks.

Making navigation faster and easier: Visual Assist’s Find Symbol

In the span of collecting and adding to their suite of software, they found Visual Assist, a productivity plugin for Visual Studio. They had a pain point in navigating projects that made their daily experience with their IDE cumbersome and uncomfortable, ergo bad for productivity.

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Specifically, they were looking for a “find symbol” type navigation for Visual Studio C++. Particularly when they were browsing a large codebase, and they wanted to find some specific functionality but they did not know exactly what it will be called or where it will be. They needed a dialog box that would search for any symbol across opened and unopened workspaces and reactively respond and filter based on the string the user starts to type in. They expect the dialog to show classes and files (and much more) matching what the string query is.

The problem was that, while it was available in Visual Studio, the search results had to be searched manually across a scattered list of possible dialogs that were searched by: files by name, only symbols in the currently opened file, symbols in all opened files, and text across files (was experimental then).

Furthermore, it was unsuitable because of the matching and search algorithm that the default IDE is using. They needed something that can understand a more abstracted and an unexact version—they were looking for a ubiquitous search dialog with fuzzy search that performed well even on large code bases. 

That’s when they found Visual Assist. Here’s a quick comparison of how Visual Assist compares with the default IDE. 

By happenstance, it was recommended to them from an external developer and it fit exactly what they were looking for. It also did not mess with existing work pattern (and muscle memory) because it was just a plugin that added or augmented their current IDE for C/C++ and C# (i.e. easy deployment).

The Visual Assist plugin they added had a more comprehensive, powerful, and sophisticated search dialog that was both as performant as it was smart. It had fuzzy searching that made project navigation simpler. And it also had a much more intuitive and easy-to-use UI wherein they only have to click to configure instead of grappling with multiple different dialogs (minimized required actions).

Fifteen minutes saved daily, becomes an hour saved weekly, and becomes almost an entire workday’s worth in one and a half months.

Discovering something unexpected: Visual Assist’s Code Refactoring

After a few months of using Visual Assist, Ryan and team then discovered that their newly acquired plugin was a solution for another problem they didn’t know they had. This is one of those cases wherein before you discover that there was a better way to do it, you wouldn’t know how inefficient you were. 

The phantom pain point they had was maintaining code. Refactoring (translating and maintaining) code bases was a cumbersome and eye-straining process. It dealt with unfamiliar, often outdated code. While working on some deprecated projects or shelved projects, they had to update existing source to more modern C++ standards or more scalable code styles. This often involved manual checking and error-prone manual techniques.

With Visual Assist’s code refactoring and navigation support, the team was able to reduce code duplication and augment their intention actions when applying refactoring techniques. 

For example:

• Read unfamiliar code as if they were your own: There is a feature that allows users to extract a method from a long function, after which users can either refactor, rewrite, rename, and reuse the method. They no longer had to fully comprehend unfamiliar code (e.g. code that was just inherited from a colleague no longer on the team) just to refactor them for the current project.
• Get method placeholders instantly: Write out a class declaration and then have Visual Assist write the stubs for the member definitions for you in the corresponding source file, rename variables across the whole project,
• Find and jump to declarations: Search for declarations/definitions faster than IntelliSense can find them, open a file anywhere in the solution in only a few keystrokes, etc. It’s quite handy and easy to use.

It’s like discovering a new shortcut to your office that makes your daily commute a few minutes faster—it seems like a marginal gain, but you realize it’s a task you do on a daily basis. 

That’s what they found with Visual Assist. Even if they weren’t actively looking for it, regular and continuous usage opened new opportunities to optimize their refactoring process. After discovering it, it would be difficult to revert to the original, more lengthy process.

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To summarize:

• • It adequately solved multiple pain points.
  • It was inexpensive.
  • It was easily deployable to their current workflow.
  • It made their workflow more comfortable and efficient.

Making a case for investments in software

Unfortunately, there are many software companies that miss the importance of providing tools like these. Or in other words, they may not deem these as necessities as much as their developers. There are two ways to look at it. You are either the developer/end user, or you are the C-level procurement officer.

The goal of this post (apart from sharing a success story) is to show how to present a case to management that developers benefit from a comfortable environment, and that would require some investment in software. Otherwise, it’s like giving someone a hammer with no nails and expecting a house to be built in a reasonable time. Craftspeople need good tools. You might have a hammer and nails, but what if your only hammer is a rubber mallet? You’d be incredibly happy to finally get a metal nail hammer.

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When you present a case (or when a case is presented to you), the normal reaction is to expect a numerical prediction of the returns. But as you may have surmised from the two examples we mentioned above, it’s not that simple for software tools:

• It’s hard to quantify productivity.
• There are some things you can only discover after using the tool.

However, that is not to say that it’s impossible to make a case for a tool. In Ryan’s case, his team was dealing with frustration in locating and navigating certain symbols. That’s expected because in Unreal’s sample shooter game alone, there are around 30 000 defined symbols, 1200 files and headers, and even more references to and from your symbols. What more could a full-fledged project be? 

At that point, it was obvious that simple navigation was a friction point in their daily workflow. If your hammer had a bendable handle you could argue that it’s still usable and could be enough to help build a simple structure. But with each successive swing, frustration and fatigue builds up. This also happens with developers in front of their computer. 

Now, even without a numerical representation, it becomes easier to convince decision makers that this tool is worth it just by simply observing how comfortable it makes developers in their workstation. (That’s why software tools often have free trial periods!)

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Finally, it’s important to note that not unlike the coding development environment, tools and plugins require mastery as well. When you make a case for investments, it’s important to note that the value of a tool increases over time as users become more accustomed to it.

Before Ryan’s team first discovered VA’s refactoring features, the team had to rely on their own expertise and knowledge to refactor code bases. They first had to understand it themselves and then they had to rewrite code based on the latest coding standards and guidelines.

Overtime, they found that VA was intelligent enough to not only make navigating and reading code easier, it could actually do it for them. If you’ve ever done any coding or similar thinking-heavy tasks, you’d know that that brief moment can make you lose that train of thought you had—that happens often during coding. But with a coding assistant like Visual Assist, you get intelligent dialogs that show you everything you need to know. You can get suggestions as you write, meaning you get timely prompts so you can focus. You can even get it to write blocks of code for you automatically.

Here’s the bottom line: a refactoring tool like VA reduces distracted time and increases their productivity by letting them focus on the real essence of the application (the code) and less on the plumbing (jumping from page to page  for a single symbol definition).

Conclusion

There is no singular approach to finding out what or what not to invest in. And similarly, there is no magic bullet that will fix all productivity problems. But Ryan’s mindset on what his team needed and how he perceived the impact of a solution is a great start. 

The key takeaway here is how important it is to have a comfortable workstation because you can radically lower your productivity and your quality output if you’re not provided adequate tools to fulfill your job. Apart from price and other technical factors, buying decisions should also be based on how much it benefits you and your team.

Try Visual Assist

Interested in getting the same benefits for you or your team?

Whether you’re looking to boost your team’s productivity or optimizing your own development process, you can try out Visual Assist for yourself and understand yourself why Ryan’s team continue to use it until today.