Contact us anytime to know more — Abhishek P., Founder & CFO CISIN
This article's focus will be on techniques which will assist with kick-starting custom software development.
We will show how to speed up production without compromising quality.
How Does Software Development Speed Depend On?
Understanding what factors determine software development speed is of vital importance in today's fast-paced software industry.
Let's consider some key components which influence or impede the project's progression as we look into their influence or impede on it respectively.
The Complexity of the Development Process
Team leaders often face challenging roadblocks during software development processes. From complex software architectures and integration with third parties to unclear project requirements and tight deadlines, meeting them becomes harder with every roadblock faced by their teams.
Code Quality
Finding an equitable balance between deadlines and high-quality codes can be tricky. Cutting corners is necessary, but compromising code quality could have devastating repercussions for your project; fixing errors later or restructuring often proves more complicated and expensive than getting it right from the outset.
Size of Team
While larger teams might seem beneficial at first, in reality, they could hold back progress on your software project.
Communication among participants becomes complicated with more participants; managing schedules and expectations to make sure everyone understands the project can become cumbersome; additionally, there may be disparate experience levels and misaligning goals within such large groups that create even further confusion and delay the completion of goals.
Human Factor
A major influencer of software development projects lies within human nature itself - even for highly experienced teams - who may experience challenges due to human limitations and errors made during software development projects is human factor error, leading to delays, extra costs and rework; burnout may occur due to overwhelmed developers leading to decreased productivity which delays projects; responding to feedback can take even more time, further delaying it altogether.
Software development projects may become delayed for various reasons. While we only scratched the surface here, identifying and addressing such obstacles are key in keeping projects on schedule.
Compare Different Approaches To Faster Software Development
Speed in software development is of utmost importance; how can you find an approach that will speed your project while maintaining quality? Here, let us examine various approaches for faster software development so we can find one which meets the requirements of your team and their individual members.
Sprint Mentality vs Marathon Mentality
Sprint and Marathon Mentalities offer two different approaches to software design, each offering its benefits and challenges.
Sprint Mindset emphasizes short bursts to deliver quick results quickly. This approach allows teams to make great strides quickly while remaining flexible enough to respond swiftly when urgent problems arise.
Unfortunately, the sprint mentality may lead to burnout as developers find it hard to keep pace with such an energetic pace of development.
Marathon Mentality emphasizes a steady pace to achieve sustained success over the long haul. With such an approach, developers are encouraged to concentrate on long-term objectives while developing deeper knowledge about their projects.
Although a marathon mentality may provide better work-life equilibrium for some individuals, finding an acceptable balance may allow faster development without compromising quality or service delivery.
Agile Software Development
Agile software development is an adaptive approach that prioritizes collaboration, customer satisfaction and ongoing improvement.
Teams using an agile methodology don't adhere to an exact schedule but instead divide projects up into more manageable segments called sprints for easier project execution - these typically last only several weeks each and culminate with an increment.
Agile development relies heavily on open communication. Daily stand-up meetings and feedback loops keep everyone apprised.
At the same time, an inclusive culture within a team allows it to respond rapidly to changing client requirements while meeting client satisfaction with every final product delivered.
Agile development offers teams a method of maintaining high-quality software while speeding the development process, all the while shortening development cycles and increasing effectiveness and efficiency in software creation.
If you want more information about Agile, we have written an article here for those curious.
Lean Method
The Lean Method is an approach adapted from manufacturing that seeks to streamline processes while emphasizing those elements that provide maximum value to customers.
Continuous improvement is at the center of this methodology as teams actively examine and refine workflows to detect roadblocks or inefficiencies and rectify them as soon as possible.
Lean methodology empowers teams by adopting an iterative "build-measure-learn" feedback loop to rapidly iterate on products and quickly adapt to changing customer requirements and expectations.
Through rapid iteration cycles and swift adaptation to changing requirements, this method ensures final versions that align perfectly with customer demands and expectations.
Lean is an approach that fosters productivity and efficiency, emphasizing sustainable development methods while cutting redundant work.
Lean can speed up software development without compromising product quality or team well-being - it has proven itself time after time as one of the most sought-after ways of working. It makes perfect sense why it has proven such an appealing option among so many organizations today.
How To Accelerate Your Software Development Process Without Wearing Out Your Developers
No matter the scope or timeline, quality should never have to be sacrificed in software projects. Our proven approach that emphasizes both speed and quality allows you to deliver excellent software on schedule - let's dive in together to see how this can work.
1. Establish Clear Development Standards
It may come as a surprise, but many best practices used during software development teams are informal.
They may become redundant when formalized into official rules or documents. Therefore it's critical that development standards be developed through consensus or expert advice, then documented and accepted across your entire organization.
To meet these standards, you must emphasize the significance of both code documentation and review processes. Without sufficient documentation in place, tracking progress becomes difficult, and accountability will suffer as a result.
2. Small Teams Or Small Components Are Best For This Type Of Work
Small teams or components work best when performing this kind of task. Completion time depends upon factors like complexity and the number of developers working on a project; this relationship, though not linear, doesn't always predict faster development; adding more programmers doesn't ensure faster results.
Rather, experienced developers in smaller teams often outshone more inexperienced ones in larger ones due to better communication channels or job allocation processes than their counterparts on large teams.
At cisin, we believe the most efficient way to manage large projects is to break them into smaller tasks using an agile method that emphasizes small parts and team structure.
Tasks should then be assigned autonomously, with our aim being for effective teams that thrive at what they do. This strategy results in efficient and cohesive teams achieving exceptional performance on every assignment they tackle.
Read More: Brief Explanation of Software Development Life Cycle
3. Work In Progress (WIP), Manage Your Tasks
Multitasking may sound appealing, but not everyone can successfully multitask. An inexperienced programmer might make mistakes while trying to manage multiple tasks simultaneously and may end up not keeping an eye on productivity as backlogs accumulate.
Kanban boards offer an effective solution - by restricting how many columns per task there can be for each, so your team is sure they complete any pending assignments before moving on to new projects.
4. Lean Is A Powerful Approach To Business
Lean is an Effective Strategy Lean software development is an approach that emphasizes essential product elements while conserving time and resources, leading to frequent feedback loops, early identification of issues and quicker product deliveries.
By tracking progress accurately over time and gathering pertinent data as development moves along, this method helps facilitate changes throughout development as necessary while managing development effectively.
5. Technical Debt
It is the deliberate decision to choose a less-than-optimal option to speed up software development services.
If done strategically and dealt with in the future, technical debt may not be necessarily a bad thing. If technical debt isn't managed correctly, it could lead to increased system complexity and even serious issues.
It may appear that taking shortcuts can save you time, but they will create more issues in the end. It's better to start with proper code to prevent technical debt.
6. Automation As Much As Possible
Automation should be utilized as often as possible when developing software applications since automating manual tasks allows your team to focus on more intricate work while minimizing errors or delays in completion.
Automation may be useful across a range of areas:
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Automation Testing: Software testing can take a lot of time and be prone to human error.
Automatic testing tools can help identify problems faster, more accurately and reduce manual testing.
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Continuous Integration and Deployment Pipelines (CI/CD): CI/CD pipelines are a great way to improve software development.
The pipelines automate building, testing and deploying changes to code, allowing your team to release features faster and with more confidence.
If you are looking for a CI/CD Engineer, Cyber Infrastructure Inc.
can help.
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Workflow Automation Tools: This tool can automate many tasks in development, including issue tracking, project management and code review.
Automating repetitive and time-consuming processes will allow your team to become more productive while also reducing the chance of error.
7. Software Development Demands Expert Skills
In the software industry, investing in your team pays dividends: providing ongoing learning opportunities will keep them at the cutting edge of technology and tools and make for quicker production times and higher quality work.
8. Motivate Your Employees With Short-Term Rewards
Provide short-term rewards to employees to boost motivation; use the "carrot and stick" approach as a great way to inspire your team; small rewards will encourage more effort on their part and could include team-building games, social gatherings or even surprise pizza party celebrations to reduce stress, boost morale and lead to more efficient working processes.
9. Minimize Waste and Non-Value-Added Activities
Software development can benefit greatly by cutting excess fat and forgoing non-value-added activities or eliminating them.
As "less is more", eliminating unimportant tasks allows your team to focus more on achieving its goals while not getting sidetracked by unnecessary tasks that distract from important ones - creating an efficient workflow, reduced time spent per assignment and increased quality results in quicker software development with better quality overall.
10. Work and Life Balance
Striking the right balance between work and personal life is vitally important in order to avoid burnout, or "all work, no play".
Therefore breaks must be taken from work-related activities in order to recharge batteries and counteract the effects associated with excessive working.
11. Extend Your Team
Sometimes the timeframe and scope of a project do not line up perfectly with one another, and extra resources may be needed to finish on time and within scope.
A simple solution would be expanding the development team to accommodate an increase in workload.
Do you want to learn how to build software faster while hiring remote engineers quickly and affordably? Look no further.
Cyber Infrastructure Inc offers staffing services to assist you in hiring talent or an entire team for a specified period.
At our team of recruitment experts, we take on every stage of recruitment, from finding top talent to managing them and freeing you to concentrate on software development.
With their expert guidance, they help build remote teams which meet business requirements while producing top-quality results.
Software development requires many components and methodologies to produce positive results, so any disruption of one component or method could impede further work on its development process and limit the speed of progress.
How Does Software Development Progress, And What Are Its Dependencies?
How can we speed up development processes? We will start by exploring potential root causes behind slow development processes.
1. Complexity
The difference in complexity may seem self-evident; let's break this down even further: in the early days of gaming, when consoles such as Atari 2600 reigned supreme, one developer could produce full games within months; today, though, triple-A games like Red Dead Redemption 2 can require years to develop by multiple dedicated teams of developers.
Complex projects have expanded considerably over time. A development team may face numerous hurdles during its work; coders face more difficulty the more complicated their project becomes.
Three project complexity categories that could impede development speed:
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Project Complexity: A clear understanding of project requirements is necessary when building a relationship with a custom software company.
It is important to plan.
Otherwise, you will end up wasting time on meetings and calls that you could have avoided.
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Tech Challenges: Some projects may require complex software architectures, integrations with third parties, or the development of innovative solutions.
This can increase the complexity of a project and therefore slow down development.
These issues must be addressed during the planning stage to establish realistic project timelines.
- Structure Complexity: It is increasingly hard to manage and control a large number of workflows and resources when there are multiple stakeholders and many different stakeholders.
2. People
People are the cornerstone of any successful business. Their work does not always follow a linear trajectory and retains equal efficiency throughout.
That is to be expected and normal; software development often slows during certain seasons (i.e. Christmas holidays and vacation periods); furthermore, size can have an effect.
Though team success depends on each member contributing, more team members do not always produce better results; success of any given project lies primarily with how well its internal messaging is communicated to all its participants.
Cyber Infrastructure Inc. places great value in developers enjoying working together and has developed teams that communicate seamlessly thanks to our careful selection process, greatly increasing employee and customer satisfaction daily.
For larger development teams of 7 or more members, finding a common language may become challenging; an experienced project manager may assist them.
One important issue regarding developers' soft skills and experience levels is how people perceive a highly experienced development team will produce faster work rates; however, product owners must assign tasks suitable to every member's knowledge, experience, and level of skill on their team.
3. Framework
In IT, frameworks provide developers with an effective structure which facilitates faster software development processes.
They serve as an 'application base' on which you can build applications without starting each new project from scratch; many frameworks are specific to one programming language but may also be utilized across many tasks.
Frameworks used for various purposes can be divided into various types. Here is an example:
- Front-end frameworks like AngularJS, ReactJS or VueJS.
- Frameworks for the back-end, such as Ruby on Rails or Spring Boot.
- Mobile frameworks like Java or React Native.
Click the link below to read our detailed guide on how Java is used for software development. The overall speed of your project can be negatively affected by choosing a framework unfamiliar to you and your team.
4. Resources
Even minor modifications can drastically change a project and its requirements, necessitating major adjustments to both design and software implementation.
Avoid software companies that engage in uncontrolled project expansion by adding features not anticipated from your chosen architecture or by changing requirements without informing everyone on your development team about such alterations; such behavior could impact development speed negatively.
5. Code Quality
Two sides to every equation often seem at odds: code quality can become compromised when too much emphasis is put on speed.
A development team that faces tight deadlines might feel pressured into working too fast; skipping tests and shortcutting code quality becomes likely in these circumstances.
Bugs will arise no matter how rapidly your project advances initially. Rewriting and correcting parts of code could take significant effort from developers who could otherwise become overwhelmed and leave.
Under such pressure, their passion could even falter for your project and trust in it could be eroded.
Last Words
For large projects, planning, testing, and code reviews should all play an integral part in software development.
When searching for top-of-the-line solutions that understand your business goals and deliver excellence through software solutions development - Cyber Infrastructure Inc can be an ideal partner:
Experience: Our experts are seasoned professionals who keep up with the newest technologies and best practices.
Your project is in the best hands. It will receive first-class attention and expert advice.
Customization: We don't believe in a one-size fits all mentality. Instead, we create customized strategies that are aligned with your goals.
We guarantee your project will exceed expectations.
Communications: If you decide to work with our team, expect an open communication line and a collaborative environment.
We are committed to maintaining an open line of communication with clients and ensuring transparency at every stage.
Quality and Speed: Our software is developed at a rapid pace without compromising on quality. You can benefit from the advantages of an accelerated development process while still maintaining the highest standards.
Track Record: We are very proud of the track record we have built, with an impressive portfolio of clients and many happy ones.
Our goal is to keep you on the cutting edge of your industry and help your business grow.
