The software industry is facing a serious problem. Projects are either too big or too small for them to be profitable. This leads to an increase in the number of bankruptcies, causing what is called “the great recession”. The development teams are increasing in number while they cannot keep up with all their tasks and deadlines, resulting in a huge delay on the delivery date which is necessary for the success of a project.
If a product hasn’t been delivered by the desired due date, it loses its value during time and sometimes even becomes completely obsolete. The team’s performance level decreases as well because it can’t handle all projects at once. In today’s world most products have a short lifespan, so if you fail to deliver, somebody else will do it before you.
The cost of software development is large and it increases every day. Everybody knows that the best way to reduce costs is to simplify things. Here are some ways to do just that:
1. Stick to what you know
It seems obvious but apparently not so much! In the era where everything can be outsourced through outsourcing companies or freelancers, many teams forget about their competitive advantages. Don’t outsource your core competencies to other companies, it usually leads to something different than you imagined! That just leads to a loss of competitive superiority that you have on the market, saves no time and money and can result in bad quality of the product. A team should only do its best at what it does best!
2. Use lean methodologies
Lean is a set of methods for eliminating waste from a process by getting rid of things not directly adding value to the end product or service. In this way of working, there are many principles such as continuous improvement, specialization and simplification of processes etc. The idea behind them is simple: do more with less by sacrificing non-essential activities or features that lead to decrease in product’s quality.
3. Get rid of unnecessary meetings
Meetings are critical for project success but there are a ton of them that don’t add any value or can be done in an informal way. Many managers tend to overuse the power given to them, which leads to work paralysis and waste of time and money! The idea behind meetings is not only to convey information but also involve people into the decision making process by collecting feedback from them so don’t allow events when developers are stuck somewhere because nobody knows what they should do next! Let your teams interact between themselves more often by using chat or forums instead of wasting their time by attending unnecessary meetings.
4. Outsourcing needs limits
In most companies there is a problem, everybody looks for an opportunity to get rid of unnecessary employees which leads to outsourcing. This way you end up with a huge number of developers that are not familiar or don’t know how your product works or even believe that they are working on something big, because it sounds good for them! What’s the point in doing this? “Big” means nothing if you can’t deliver on time. Huge piles of useless code can be confusing, messy and hard to maintain so limit outsourcing by choosing only the best IT specialists who will contribute to product delivery and not waste time with learning complex technology.
In Summary
If you are striving to reduce the cost of software development, then definitely you need to know about ways that will help your team to be more productive. The above mentioned tips are not an ultimate solution but can lead your project in the right direction. Finding the root of the problem is very important for shortening the duration of each stage in the software development lifecycle and knowing what practices should be avoided or used wisely.
