How do you improve SDLC tool performance?

When exploring the best tools for the project team, you should also consider costs and compatibility with existing internal and client tools. While some tools may be great individually, they may not be ideal when integrating with project tools to streamline or automate processes. You should definitely perform a cost benefit analysis and technical evaluation across the different phases of the project lifecycle to identify use cases, any risks or potentials issues before making a decision. Sometimes, some of these tools will have to be handed over to the client at the end of the project, so it's important to loop in the client in decision making.

A big decision can be whether you want a better integrated suite of capabilities from a single vendor, or build a best-in-class collection of capabilities from the market. Most SDLC tools will do multiple things (e.g. Atlassian Suite vs Azure DevOps), but they do parts of it better than others. Almost all can work together as well, so you have the option of going in either direction. And, of course, what you choose will also be influenced by how well they support the type of software you're writing and how you publish it. Each vendor is slightly optimized to a particular technology stack and, in the cloud space, to their own cloud products.

Keep in mind, the more customisation, plugins, extensions etc you add to your tooling, the more complexity and cost it can add to the maintenance of your tooling. This may even make keeping your tooling on the latest version more difficult.

I would suggest the word "may" is not needed - as very few SDLC products work out of the box for your use case. You will have to customize it to your team, product, and environment. But, balance this with Sam Hill's comment - don't make it so over-configured it becomes fragile. As for the "may need to clean up" - this isn't optional. With today's third party "supply chain" cybersecurity risk, leaving old, redundant technology lying around means your increasing your attack surface - meaning you're far more likely to have an exploitable vulnerability in your environment.

Monitoring and troubleshooting your software's development is a key reason to have any SDLC products. These products exist so you can see how much work is getting done, what the work is, and whether it's working as expected. Traceability is critical in software development, and SDLC products make traceability possible.

Consider recording any workshops, webinars and training sessions provided to team project team members and storing them, along with other useful documentation, in a team folder so it's easily accessible by the project team. Recording training sessions has many benefits, including reducing the time and cost of training for the project, which can be used on actual project work. Team members can easily acquire knowledge in their own time, reducing the people and resources involved. This is especially helpful when onboarding new team members as well.

How to motivate the team members to use SDLC tool to its full extent? What insights would an SDLC tool provide? How to promote continued use of the tool while not taking away time from actual work to be performed?

This is where a trusted partner of your organization, bringing expertise around the SDLC products, can really accelerate and improve the adoption of the products. Knowing that things are configured the right way from the start, and your team is trained - not just on the "art of the possible" but also the "actual" is invaluable.

100% - I discussed this on the "Train and education your project team" - as expertise should come in at that phase (and earlier) to help make sure you have a successful implementation of your selected SDLC products.

It's worth making sure the full SDLC process is mapped and agreed by all stakeholders before looking at tooling. Review your SDLC for potential changes before looking at tooling too e.g. - Is there any waste you can get rid of? - Are there any constraints that can be removed? When looking at tooling, if you're finding that no tooling fits your SDLC, or requires significant customisation to fit it, this is probably a sign to take a better look at your SDLC and potential changes to it before proceeding with tooling