If you are looking for software solutions to solve your specific business problem, you might be surprised to find that there are no off-the-shelf solutions available to meet your needs. Custom software development is a possible solution even though it requires hefty investment. So, how can you increase the chances of success for a custom software development project?
Custom software development: Key Points To Consider
In today’s digital economy, every business needs to rely on software to succeed and thrive in the market. If you want to effectively build your own custom software, you need to learn how to involve and manage the software development process. Consider the following areas that you have control over.
Improve Business Outcomes
If you approach the development process correctly, custom software offers excellent opportunities to improve business results.
First, prioritize the functionalities you want to have in the software. It is recommended to build the main features first and defer the secondary ones to the later stages of the project. This way, your product can get to market faster and start reaping the benefits from it. Then, you can gradually add more features to update your software. By asking for users for feedback on the go, you can avoid the costs of introducing unnecessary features into the software.
Secondly, It is important to integrate new software into your existing systems where possible. For example, you may need new project management software, but your old system already has employee time tracking. By integrating your own software to an existing solution, you can save time and effort on implementing a separate time management feature.
Faster results
Generally speaking, a custom software development project may take months or even years to complete. Fortunately, there are ways to speed up the process and get results faster.
It’s essential that your projects follow software development best practices and proper methodologi(es). The two most used software development methodologies include Agile and Waterfall. Agile enables early product delivery by creating a minimum viable product (MVP) with just enough features that meet early users requirements. More features are gradually implemented with each iteration. Users adopt the MVPs and provide feedback so project teams can focus on improving their most popular features.
In addition, Agile makes it easy to change software requirements at any stage of the project. If you are not going to change your project, the waterfall model is a good choice. On the contrary, Waterfall changes are complex and time-consuming, which can delay project delivery. Yet, the waterfall model is easy to use. Waterfall is a suitable option for small projects with well-defined needs.
Define important project milestones and document them in the contract.
Milestones represent the completion of critical project steps that require a certain amount of time, resources, and effort. For instance, let’s say you’ve been tasked with developing a new employee management system. Your project milestones may look like this:
- Project initiated.
- Requirement gathering.
- Employee profiles.
- Payroll module.
- Attendance and leave tracking.
- Performance evaluation.
- Testing & QA.
- System deployed to the HR department.
Here, you can set target dates for each milestone and evaluate the project team’s performance based on such a target. This can be helpful, especially when the development team is working under a time and materials (T&M) pricing model (the total time spent on the project is not fixed). Tracking their ability to meet each key deadline will help reveal any potential problems that extend the project schedule.
Custom software development costs
Like any projects, custom software development costs can far exceed your budget, but there are ways to control them.
The longer the project goes on, the higher the cost of software development. Therefore, it’s best to make sure the project team chooses a suitable software development model and completes the project milestones and doing their best to meet the planned project timeline.
You can also reduce the costs of custom software development by partnering with offshore software companies located overseas, such as Asia or Vietnam, since these companies tend to have much lower labor costs than their American counterparts.
Also, ensure that the project team allocates sufficient time for software testing and quality assurance throughout the development process. Debugging early is much cheaper than doing it later in the project.
Last but not least, ask the software architect to design the system to work well with the hardware you have. This will save additional hardware costs.
Risks management
There are some risks to consider before embarking on custom software development.
One of them is the lack of budget, which can be caused by a variety of reasons. For example, many features can be ignored from the start, reducing the value of the software. Although the project team tries to fix it, there may be a lack of resources to implement the desired feature. Thus, it’s better to wisely allocate financial resources and fund reserves for unexpected changes. Additionally, expect the project team to follow the chosen budget allocation method from the start.
For technical risks, beware of assigning developers to unfamiliar tasks within the project. This can cause errors in the code and cause the project to delay or even fail. Therefore, ensure that redistribution of experts within the project group is reduced to a minimum. To prevent confusion and avoid potential issues, the project structure, source code, and documentation must be available and transparent enough to help developers take over the works of their colleagues,
The project team may not have the knowledge and experience required in your industry. This can reduce software quality and stretch project deadlines. To quickly verify project team efficiencies, you should monitor their performance by setting milestones and seeing if the team can achieve them. You should also specify in the contract how often the developer will provide progress reports on your project or employ other means to hold the vendor accountable for their performance.
Always remember to document your software requirements. Otherwise, you risk not getting what you asked for and no ground to request afterwards.
Sustainability
Sustainability means that the software features you use today will be available in the future and will be continuously improved and supported.
The first thing to consider is the technologies and tools stack that you decided to use to build the software. If you want a product that can be used for a long time without large investments, you should use technology that will not be obsolete after 1-2 years. This way you avoid having to completely revamp the software later.
Choose a software development partner that is ready to provide you with support and maintenance and the technical team that is familiar with the product development process. They help solve any problem quickly and efficiently. The average life cycle of a software system is 5-10 years, so appropriate maintenance periods must be clearly specified in the contract.
Among prominent problems that can occur during project development is poor code quality. This makes testing and debugging very time consuming. In addition, low-quality code makes it difficult to add new features and more prone to errors. Moreover, new developers will find it difficult to grasp and get started with the project. So before signing the contract, discuss with the project manager the code quality required for the project.
More importantly, no matter how skilled your project team may be, you should avoid being locked into the contract with one vendor indefinitely. Your business retains ownership of the source code. So if you change the vendor, the new custom software development company does not have to start the development process from scratch.
Wrapping-Up
To reap the benefits of custom software as quickly as possible, prioritize features and ask developers to integrate custom software into existing solutions. To achieve faster results, choose a software development method that best suits your project, set milestones to review the project team’s performance.
It’s also vital that you apply risk mitigation measures to prevent budget overruns and ensure high product quality. As for sustainability, make sure your custom software is built using modern technologies and specify a maintenance period in the contract. In order to reduce custom software development costs, pay attention to ensuring that the project team respects time constraints and ensures software quality throughout the development process.