With more than 15 years of experience providing software development services, we can say that creating a well thought-out strategy is a prerequisite of any successful software development project. A software development strategy is a collective set of strategic decisions that enables you to establish a set of do’s, don’ts and what-tos related to the design, development and implementation for each phase of the development project.

In this article, we discuss the important questions that need to be answered about the effective development strategy of software solutions, including the specific aspects of enterprise software development and software product development.

In-house software development vs. outsourcing

Medium to large-size software development projects, especially enterprise software, require extensive knowledge and technical expertise – including business analysis, software architecting, design and development, software testing & QA, Cloud infrastructure and DevOps, project management, and so on.

Furthermore, a specific technical skill may be required if your future software solution uses advanced technologies such as big data, IoT, machine learning, or if a project uses advanced architecture like Microservices, or DevOps practices. The internal team may not have the necessary skills and training them may take time, costly, or simply risky (e.g. delaying project).

Full or partial software outsourcing can be considered as a solution, but it will still require a considerable effort on your part. You may need to exercise overall control over a project and closely manage the outsourcing vendor to ensure that the vendor’s work meets your expectations and quality standards. However, an experienced outsourcing can help to keep your efforts at a minimum by self-managing along with transparent processes.

How to reduce costs?

To reduce costs, you can:

• Implement software testing / QA as soon as possible once development starts. Just as it is cheaper to diagnose and prevent diseases before it’s too late, it’s just as important to test and fix defects earlier in the development cycle.

• Reusing existing software components (for example, reusing existing components for user authentication and multi-factor authentication processes.)

• Leverage cloud computing services (such as storage services, cyber-security services, and others).

• Opt for open source solutions (remember to conduct checking carefully as open source platforms may not have regular updates and support.).

There are many ways to reduce software development costs, but remember that each of the methods all have their own weaknesses.

Switch to outsourcing.

Successful outsourcing requires a reliable partner with a well-established and transparent outsourcing process, capable of efficient self-management.

Is there a detailed set of requirements for your product?

The type of software model that you choose will largely define future development plans. If you feel that the future application and development process does not require extensive flexibility or involve technology or process innovation, there is nothing wrong with taking a linear development approach such as the Waterfall model. The project requirements, deadlines and budget will be defined at the beginning and do not change during the project. Under this approach, the project will be easy to manage and will not require much of your participation and effort for completion.

If the project is large and complex, the requirements will likely change which you need to take into account for a smooth execution. By planning your development process iteratively, you allow the project requirements to evolve during the development phase, based on information from previous releases and feedback from your users. However, this type of development path will require strong project management skills and your continued, active participation.

How can you speed up development time?

Choose the right technology stacks and platforms

The choice of technology (not only the programming languages, but also frameworks, patterns, APIs and more) is important, because it can significantly impact the development speed ranging from double the time taken to over 10 times more. For example, by using a modern framework like React for building dynamic web applications can result in much faster development compared to a more outdated technology like jQuery. Meanwhile, platforms can also differ in terms of reliability. For instance, you could plot platforms such as AWS and Google Cloud in the high-reliability and high-speed quadrant, while placing less reliable or slower alternatives in other quadrants.

Points to remember:

• Make sure that the technical choices of your future development project are compatible with the ones that are already in use in your company’s IT environment or products.

• Stay aware of the maintainability of the platform you choose (including version, release, development frequency) and long-term support costs, especially when it comes to open-source technologies.

Use automation

Implementing automation in development, testing and deployment can also help speed up the development process. Some of the most commonly used tools and processes for automation are:

• Containerization. These are lightweight containers that package an application with all its libraries and executables. Containers encapsulate an application along with its dependencies (libraries and executables), ensuring consistent performance across environments. This method streamlines deployment and simplifies the management of large, complex systems.

• Test automation. Test automation refers to the systematic test planning, design, development and automation of test execution.

• DevOps. The DevOps approach and its practices, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), ensure consistent and reliable software releases through alignment across development, test, and production environments.

Apply Agile development methodology

Begin the project with a minimum viable product (MVP) or the first basic version of your software application with all the fundamental features. An MVP provides a working software solution with enough important features that brings value and additional features can be added later taken into account user feedback. The same principle can be applied to testing activities. Critical features can be attended to first, while less important features can be tested later.

Is industry compliance necessary for your product?

If your project needs to follow strict rules and regulations, such as industry-specific ones like HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc., consider incorporating those into the development process to meet compliance requirements effectively as early as possible.

What are the most important quality features for your app?

The future results of your application depends, largely, on your software development design decisions. For instance, to ensure system flexibility, you should choose an architectural model that is modular such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), or Microservices.

Moreover, for system security, you can isolate vulnerable data by introducing mediators, and implement mechanisms for verifying and encoding data from external sources, such as users’ browsers, external databases, or web services. And for high performance, you can implement caching, duplicate functionality through multiple instances performing the same task, and leverage distributed, asynchronous computing.

A mobile first world

Smartphones are a necessity in the modern world. Depending on the nature of your software application and project goals, you may opt for different options for optimal mobile-enablement. The most popular options, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, are:

• Native mobile application development including iOS and Android.

• Cross-platform mobile app development (e.g. React Native)

• Mobile web application and PWA (progressive web application)

What unique benefit will your product offer?

After a thorough research of market opportunities and competitor offerings, decide how your product will be different. For example, this could be advanced technical capabilities like AI-powered automation (e.g. eKYC), customer service, value for money, efficiency or focusing on a specific market niche (e.g. telemedicine). The chosen goals, to an extent, will determine the future development process. It affects prioritization, resource allocation and defines metrics for monitoring progress.

What methods will you use to quickly capture user insights?

Getting timely feedback and reviews from users is critical to delivering a product with market-fit, especially when customer needs are difficult to predict or change quickly. To do this, you can offer intensive prototyping, starting with an MVP launch to attract early adopters and offer trial or freemium versions.

Final-notes

Flexibility is crucial in any strategy. While constraints are seemingly unavoidable (like limited capacity, budget, time, or company policy that restrict your options), it’s important to remain objective. Instead, the plan is to acquire missing skills through outsourcing, research and subcontracting.

By making critical decisions early in your software development project, you can estimate project schedule and budget more accurately. This translates to better project resources allocation, and at the same time allowing you to find the right external vendor, or assemble an in-house team for the project faster.