Have you ever seen a business that doesn’t care about the development speed? Or a client that couldn’t care less about the release date? Neither do we, and it’s not surprising.
Every organization we’ve ever worked with was under pressure to reduce time-to-market and maintain their market share. Unless you have significant market dominance like Microsoft or Apple, you’ve got to move faster than your competitors.
What software development speed depends on?
The speed of software development depends on a few key factors:
- Development process complexities;
- Quality of code;
- Team size;
- Human factor.
- Let’s discuss about each of the factor.
Development process complexities
Every developer faces numerous challenges during the working process. These complexities may be associated with:
The technical side of the project (such as complex software architecture, third-party integrations, innovation, and so on);
Project requirements (unclear goals and objectives);
Unreasonable deadlines (e.g. when the estimated project length does not match with the actual scope of work);
Structural mismatches and internal issues within the company, etc.
Software production becomes even more challenging when the team has to deal with several complexities at once. The more problems they have, the slower the development speed will be.
Quality of code
Everybody knows that writing a high-quality code is a time-consuming process – it’s either done well or done fast. However, deadlines aren’t going anywhere. Whereas cutting down some corners are unavoidable, compromising the entire code quality will eventually increase project duration. You’ll have to fix the errors anyway, but it’s going to be difficult more and more expensive.
Team size
The success of each project depends on the efficiency of internal communication.. The optimal team size for the most productive cooperation is up to five people. The solution for large projects that require more people is to divide the developers into smaller groups based on the project.
Human factor
The performance of the whole team depends on the contribution of each member. If everybody on the team is skilled, experienced, and self-motivated, the job will be done much faster. They may eventually become the valuable asset in the entire organization.
How to boost your software development process
The efficiency of the software development process is easy to hamper, but there are quite a few things you can do to make sure your team doesn’t run into these challenges.
How to speed up your software development without compromising the product quality?
1. Strategically adjust your team’s size
If you want to get more work done, your first instinct should be to hire more people to do that work.
Sometimes, the project deadline doesn’t match its scope. The obvious solution to this problem is adding more resources. If you want to handle more code, hire more developers.
2. Work with Small Teams and Small Components
Smaller teams delivering small components and micro services deliver quickly according to Venkat Rangan (Clari Inc). When combined with systematic tests and integration, agile allows small teams to break down the larger problem and accomplish their goals quickly.
3. Challenge the Plan
At our company, we have an initial “Challenge Phase” that is designed to clarify scope and reduce risk in our projects. Often, the initial plan isn’t ultimately what gets done for a given project, so we take the time to ensure that we clearly understand the problem and outline what success means before we start. This way the hours and time we spent truly contribute to the end result.
4. Set clear requirements and roadmap
You’re going to achieve much better results if you take time to plan every step on the way. If the development team is very clear on the project requirements and goals, if they know exactly what to do and when to do it, you already save a lot of time on discussing what’s next. Create a roadmap of the entire project and discuss it with the team before the beginning of the development process. While they’re still going to be some challenges along the way, at least they won’t have to rewrite the code.
5. Define Your Deliverables
The most important part of development is defining the deliverables and sticking to them. Changing deliverables and moving the goal line will delay the project, increase costs and kill team morale. Change requests and bug fixes are inevitable. However, if the change is not related to a bug or security hole, ship the code on time and make the change in a future sprint
6. Use a Lean Approach
Fast doesn’t matter if you’re building the wrong product. The key to moving quickly and effectively is to build your product in small increments, test with real users in real-life situations ASAP, and then adjust your direction based on their feedback and your data/observations. This “Lean” approach is fully compatible with Agile, Continuous Delivery and other modern software approaches
7. Change Management
Guillermo Ramos has learned an important lesson from his time at Greatist, “There are three things to consider: scope, resources and time. Changing any one of these will affect the other two.” Increasing scope will inevitably slow down the development process without simultaneously increasing resources. The same holds true if there is a decrease in resources without a decrease in scope.
8. Hold Development Sprints
Development sprints, even inside the scope of a larger project, give your team the ability to achieve quick wins in what might otherwise be a painstakingly long development cycle. The benefit of quick wins and that feeling of gratification for your team cannot be understated: they spur, foster, motivate and ultimately culminate in more focused development on active and future projects.
There can be multiple ways that can help you in achieving your targets on time but you have to make sure you meet the quality too. This will help you in delivering the best product to the users. If you are looking to hire a mobile app development company that can meet your requirements then you can connect with iSkylar Technologies.
