Effective Software Development Strategy (Time and Budget Friendly)

Software solutions are the need of the hour in this digital world. No matter if you are a B2B or B2C business, introducing a software solution to your company can give you a competitive edge.

Nowadays, most companies choose custom software development to cater to their specific business needs. Not only it helps businesses to achieve their goals, but it also drives revenue in terms of new customers.

But the software itself doesn’t have the capability to do everything all by itself. You need a solution, an effective strategy, and a dedicated team of software engineers. So in this post, we are going to discuss a few important aspects of software development & how to build it effectively.

Without further ado, let's get started!

Is Your Company Capable of Developing Software In-House?

Mid-sized and large-scale software development needs a broad range of expertise in different spheres like project management, business analysis, prototyping, designing, development, quality analysts, and a few more.

Moreover, while the software is in the development phase, you may need some specific skills set in technologies like big data, IoT, artificial intelligence. Therefore, you need to ensure that you have enough resources to build the software on time.

What's the Solution?

Building an offshore software development team is the solution. If you are not familiarized with technical stuff, it's best to onboard a technical manager on-site, accessing the skills set requirements, and then hire a team of dedicated developers overseas.

Building an offshore development team gives offers you the following advantage:

• Access to skilled software engineers
• Staffing flexibility
• Operational cost reduction up to 60%
• Less time to market
• Focus on core business operations
• Improved in-house team efficiency, etc.

However, to get things right, you just have to ensure that your software technology partner is well equipped with the required resources. Only collaborate with an offshore delivery center that has a good market reputation and experience delivering similar solutions in the past, with the quality standards at par.

Switch to Offshore Software Development

Today, all software life cycle models are great. But do you have any idea what does the waterfall, spiral, prototyping, incremental, and programming model have in common? Well, all of them are multi-step models. You are unable to move a step ahead until the previous step is successfully completed.

When you are working with the top-notch professionals, you can stay rest assured that your offshore team will follow the best industry standards and practices. They are specialists and they know what they are doing. In fact, working with offshore developers allow you to focus on core business objectives.

Solid Software Development Strategy Begins From the Start

When starting with an effective software development plan, it is vital to lay out a detailed marketing strategy before anything else. Consider the following;

1. Who? Hiring developers is an important decision to scale up your company & fulfill your IT requirements. To make sure that you don’t waste time and effort pitching the wrong audience, go for market analysis, and in-depth competitor research.

Understand what kind of products are they seeing, why people are liking them, what marketing strategies are they following, and what is the USP of those products or services.

2. What? Once you have successfully determined the target audience, the second step is to decide what your business is going to do differently. How are you going to raise awareness among the audience and how will it manage to interest them?

This can be easily done by looking at the successful marketing plans from the competitors. In addition to this, you can come up with a completely new strategy of your own. It is advisable to choose an offshore software development company so that you can focus on your core competencies.

You just have to invest your little time in managing your remote team to ensure that everything is running smoothly.

3. Why? This factor in terms of creating the software development strategy or approach refers to why the software created by your company is worth the customer’s time and effort. Your investment will be wasted if the product you have created has no value.

If the product doesn’t do anything that customers are going to take note of, then what is the use? Ensure that the products that you are developing are something that people are desperately looking forward to.

Breaking Down the Software Development Requirements

Well, after outlining your idea, marketing strategy, and business plan, the next step is to access the skills set requirements. However, it is important that the professional evaluating the requirements is qualified enough.

Be logical and reasonable. If possible, draft a rough project charter along with the milestones. And once the hiring is done, you can finalize them along with your offshore team. To begin with, selecting the right technology platform is very important. It includes not only the language but also the framework and APIs. The platform may differ in terms of reliability.

But you have to make sure that your company is compatible with the recommended tech stack of the IT environment or the product line. Also take into account the maintainability of the technology that you have selected, its responsiveness, enhancement frequency, versions, and long-term support costs.

The strategic choice about how the software is set up, where it is hosted and also the underlying architecture are a one-time decision, but have long-term implications. You have to be very cautious while taking such decisions as the capital investment is costly and difficult to unwind.

1. List Out the Key Advantage of Your Product

After the analyses of the industry opportunities and competitors, evaluate the ‘USP’ of your product or service. It may be innovation, customer service, the optimal value for money, excellent performance, and something similar. The chosen target is the one defining the future course of development.

2. The Cost Equation

There are five major factors that contribute to the software development cost:

• The total amount of time in which the project will be completed
• The initial scope of the project
• Total number of dedicated developers working on the project
• Location of your offshore developers
• Key features of your software

Sometimes, budget problems are the result of scope creep. But a few unexpected things may contribute to that issue as it could shorten the time to deliver. You should hire Indian developers so that you can cut down the development cost and get a quality product.

3. Are you Taking Software Testing Seriously?

The product undergoes multiple levels of testing methods to make sure the functioning is reliable. It is a significant step in the development cycle. The product’s success is gauged by its quality and reliability. The company needs to test the software products to ensure if they meet the quality standards and fulfill the established goals.

Security testing helps in safeguarding the product from the breaches. Compatibility testing takes place across desired operating systems, browsers, and devices. Performance testing refers to the stress tests that make sure the system requirement for the end product will not be high.

Well-tested products incur less maintenance cost, is more accurate, consistent, and reliable. To consolidate your position in the market, product performance has to be really good and durable. This certainty is achieved only with the help of proper testing.

The process includes the assessment of the different type of information which is related to the software. Your software testing team will list out all the issues or bugs associated and will pass on this information to the development team. Your offshore developers will fix all the bugs and then again ask the software testing team to do their job.

This process will be repeated until the software is ready for the launch.

If you are working with an offshore team, it would probably include software testers. However, if you are developing in-house, you may need to add new resources that are the right fit for this job responsibility.

4. Develop Software Iteratively

Begin with the minimum viable product or the basic version of the enterprise application. This will give you a workable solution that brings value to the product or software.

Are you planning to set up your offshore development center in India? You must check this guide!

What are the Quality Attributes of an Application?

The quality attributes directly refer to software design decisions. For example:

• System Modifiability: You should choose modular, loosely coupled architecture patterns for system modifiability
• Security: Isolate the vulnerable data with the help of the introduction of the additional mediators giving the ability for verifying and encoding the incoming data from external resources.
• System Availability: Introduce mitigation units and avoid a single point of failure, from tree hierarchies, and prevent failure expansion.
• High Performance: Introduce cashing, and duplicate the functionality by having multiple instances that execute the same task.

Achieve all the good things as much as possible. Mostly. The architectural pattern enables one attribute that can adversely affect the other attribute.

SOA-based architecture makes the application more flexible as well as integration-friendly. More developers and their consistent efforts are required. They are also prone to failures and troubleshooting.

1. Go Mobile

Mobile technology is irrevocably changing the way business is done. Cisco has estimated that the total number of connected devices use will hit 34.8 billion this year and 50 billion in 2020. For this reason, the use of connected devices has significantly impacted the customer behavior.

Looking for a team to build an app for your business? Get in touch with us now to hire mobile app developers and kick start your development process!

2. Take Care of Standards and Practices your Team Follows

There are plenty of viable practices but most of them have loopholes. For example, there is a possibility that the open-source platform lacks regular updates and solid support. Successful offshore development is possible only when you collaborate with a reliable technology partner that follows a mature process.

Are the requirements crystal-clear? The software development model should clearly define the future project flow!

3. Update, Release and Repeat

As the development team codes and tests your software, don’t sit back and wait for them to create the perfect version. You can release the early version in the form of MVP and then update it later. Every software piece consists of plenty of bugs.

This happens when the team deals with thousands of lines of code. But if the team is able to fix all the issues and release an improved version of themselves, it says a lot about your brand.

The audience feels that you are paying attention to the smallest of details and trying to make the life of customers easier. Updates and new versions ensure that your company is paying attention to the requirements of the customers.

Are you planning to get started with an MVP first? Hire top offshore developers from India to bring your idea into life.

4. Think About Software Sustainability

Software development certainly takes up a lot of time, effort, and money. If it is sustained and used for a longer period of time, it will have a greater impact on people.

When you have the right software development team, they think beyond the present use of the software and how it could be exploited further. Important decisions should be made on what is to be done with the software. This will help in getting valuable ideas and the investment will become valuable.

5. Understand the Software Development Capabilities

The innovation behind the software is as important as the software itself. As a business owner, you should understand the leading development practices in order to determine the right approach for your enterprise.

6. Plan Strategy Keeping the End Goal in Mind

You know what should be the desired product, so before letting the developers start working, scribble the necessary steps on a whiteboard or notepad. Depending on the type of project, begin with the finished product and start working backward.

The next is to determine code language in smaller chunks that allow you to simplify the process. Always remember, it is very important to stick to your goals.

7. How to Create Consumer’s Interest?

Market the project in a way that customers start expecting from you. This is a very tricky strategy that works effectively as customers start waiting for the release of your product or service. Moreover, it will establish the expectations of robustness and longevity.

8. Create a Meaningful Definition Of Done

How many times before the demo you were unable to show a feature because there is something missing? Well, the developers you hire may think that the feature is completed but a software development cycle is more than that. That particular feature may work on a personal machine so it is important to get it tested on another environment.

9. Changes as per the Feedback

Getting feedback from the customer is important. Make the updations as per the likings and dislikings of the customers. We always recommend you to provide intense prototyping and begin with the launch of MVP to attract potential customers on the board while offering trial versions side by side.

Finally

Making important decisions at the initial stages of the software development project, it will be easy for you to estimate the project timeline and budget in an accurate manner, allocate the resources better and get the reliable offshore software development partner or develop the project in-house at a faster pace.

Flexibility is a very important element at every stage. Stay away from favoring/discouraging an approach, practice, or technology only because you don’t have the skills and abilities required.

When you have a flawless strategy, it is high time to get the ball rolling right?

Collaborating with a reliable outsourcing company means getting access to top-notch end-to-end development services, that too at affordable rates. So, what are you waiting for?

Hire developers from us & transform your business digitally.