In the software development ecosystem, time is the most valuable resource. IT organizations that fail to cope with effective time management during their development lifecycle are more likely to experience slow development, which is a root cause of many software failures.
Every entrepreneur in the IT space wants to utilize this precious time wisely by avoiding wasting it on unnecessary processes and activities.
In this article, we will discuss the common processes and activities that impact your development speed and how to mitigate those to improve app development speed while being up to the quality.
So, before diving deep into the solution, let’s understand the problem
Imagine, you have a really great idea with a future vision, a team of skilled developers, a good budget, and sufficient development time. You know that your app is going to work and has a great potential to grow in the market.
Within a year, you built your product and launched its first version in the market. Then in a few months, you found out that your first version is failing to penetrate the market. It takes four more months to find out the root cause and resolve the issue. By the time similar products have started coming to further increase the market competition.
During all this blunder you started running out of budget and time but still, you struggled for a few more months with lower sales. Finally, no money left to further run the business.
So here the implementation of a great idea fails, the reason can be many – maybe the project is too complex to launch in just a few months, maybe the development team takes it too long to launch the app in the market with sufficient features, or the executives fails to properly plan the project and release it at the right time.
Overall, what we can conclude here is- For entrepreneurs and developers, it’s always essential to stay ahead of time during each phase of the software development lifecycle. Because speeding up your app development process is a complex matter as it is affected by multiple things.
Processes that eat up precious time from your development lifecycle
On average, 50% of the companies outsource software development projects, however about 80% of them are over schedule due to the significant bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle itself. Knowing all these causes can help developers proactively address those issues and significantly reduce the time required for app development.
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1. Working with multiple coding and structural complexities while app development.
The difficulty or hurdles faced by the developers while developing an app impacts the overall speed of app development. These hurdles can be a result of poor refactoring, structural mismatch with the enterprise, technical debuts caused due to deadlines, and cowboy coding (not following disciplined processes).
All of these lead to unstable code and slower testing, which ultimately reduces development speed.
So, is there any way to deal with these complexities?
Building modern applications requires knowledge of programming languages, development architectures, frameworks, underlying systems, and how to integrate the system with other Software. Skilled developers with excellent domain knowledge can reduce these complexities to a great extent.
2. Non-value added workplace activities and unnecessary internal processes.
Any process that adds little value to the customers and slows down the app development lifecycle should be eliminated. These processes may include legacy processes, unnecessary documentation, and everything that consumes your resources, assets, and time. As for as possible, try to keep your internal business processes lean.
On the other hand, to save your time, you can avoid going into the meetings if you don’t have a clear agenda unless it is absolutely necessary.
One more thing that we generally see is that, if you have new people in the development team, training and mentoring them eats up your valuable time. So, think twice before recruiting inexperienced people and training them for a few months.
3. Unnecessary features.
Unnecessary processes and activities are bad, but what about the features that nobody uses? Designing, coding, testing, and deploying such features is nothing but a waste of time and resources. So, how to get the right features in your application.
Though it’s hard to find out what customers are expecting and what they want to use in your app, it’s surely not impossible to closely estimate the customer’s needs and priorities.
Here are a few ways you can get things done,
Give customers an easy way to provide feedback to understand their requirements.
Channelize customer feedback on the available features and UX changes for analysis. Create a prototype based on the user analysis.
Analyse, which is a popular feature, and draw a usage matrix to make smart decisions about features in the app.
Plan and decide on which feature to add next in advance by reviewing different sources, discussing priorities, and accumulating customer feedback.
4. Re-Work due to unclear requirements, poor designer to dev handoffs, and bugs
Re-Work can be disastrous in app development if you have limited time to deliver an app. It extends the next stages in the development lifecycle such as testing and deployment. Re-work is generally a result of unclear app requirements, code bugs, and poor designing and development handoffs.
For clear requirements, get early feedback by launching MVP
Re-work can be avoided by getting early feedback from the app users, it gives you a clear idea about the app requirements. Thus, it is often recommended to follow a progressive app development approach by launching MVP first in the market.
With such an approach, it is essential to complete all the dependent functionalities within each iteration because incomplete functionality may end up testing at the end that can be costly to fix.
Developers and designers should start communicating at an early stage to reduce the knowledge gap between both parties.
The next thing that causes rework is poor designer-to-developer handoffs. Developers and designers must understand the feature context from the first day of the actual designing and development process. Both the teams should coordinate with each other from the early stages to understand how to implement the solution according to specifications to deliver relevant and meaningful experiences to the end-users.
Avoid having long testing cycles by fixing bugs early.
Bugs in the code are inevitable. To avoid having the long testing cycles that lead to the reduction of bug fixing speed, developers should incorporate clean code development and try fixing bugs as early as possible. It will save you from big troubles during the production phase.
Conclusion
As a software developer, you would already know that developing a web or mobile app takes time, especially when you want to do a perfect job.
In the above article, we have discussed almost everything that eats up your development time and how to mitigate those issues.
Though the process involves multiple stages as a whole from requirement gathering to testing to the deployment and releasing stage with each stage requiring a huge amount of effort. Taking the right actions which we discussed above can minimize those efforts at each phase and help you significantly bring down the overall development time required to deliver the best quality apps.
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