5 ways to improve your software development process

Before your company begins any software development project, you must create a clear process for delivering a successful product that meets your objectives while staying on schedule and within budget. When you use a poorly designed process that doesn't meet your specific needs, you can end up compromising product quality and causing significant delays.

Choose the right methodology

The software development life cycle (SDLC) consists of the steps you take from first idea to deployment and beyond. Without an explicit SDLC, you're likely to end up with longer timelines, budget overruns, and subpar product quality or project failure. SDLC steps typically include:

• 1. Analysis and planning
  2. Technical requirements
  3. Design and prototyping
  4. Construction and coding
  5. Test
  6. Implantation
  7. Maintenance and updates

Different methodologies vary the sequence and order of these steps based on the specific needs, objectives, and size of the project. The two main approaches you can choose from are Waterfall and Agile.

Waterfall

With this methodology, you follow each step of the SDLC in sequence until the end, finishing one completely before moving on to the next.

Good for:

• • Teams with extensive documentation needs.
  • Projects where the goals, requirements and technology stack are unlikely to change.
  • Larger organizations that require approval of all requirements.
  • Smaller projects.
  • Projects with a fixed scope.

Not good for:

• • Testing a new product.
  • Projects that require user feedback from the beginning.
  • Making changes along the way.

Agile

With this dynamic and iterative methodology, you execute development in “sprints” of time, prioritizing work in order of importance and deadlines. After each iteration, you perform testing and get user feedback.

Good for:

• • Teams making continuous product updates.
  • Startups and technology companies testing new products.
  • Facing change and responding to needs along the way.
  • Projects that do not yet have a complete list of requirements.

Not good for:

• • Tight budgets or deadlines.
  • Risk-averse teams.
  • Projects with well-defined requirements and scope.

The following video compares Waterfall and Agile:

Adjust your workflow

With an ideal workflow, you can promote efficient teamwork, provide transparent tasks and goals, and eliminate unnecessary repetition. Try assigning responsibilities to achieve effective multitasking without overwhelming your developers with too much work. To provide ongoing guidance, outline your workflow in a digital chart accessible to your entire team. During development, ask the following questions to identify inefficiencies or bottlenecks:

• Does your workflow include slow stages?
• Is work piling up for a specific activity or developer?
• Do developers frequently reopen tasks after they have been marked complete?
• Are developers killing too many tasks before they reach completed status?

Set aside time to test

Start planning your test scenarios early in the development process, whether for your internal team or for third-party QA . Allocate enough time to testing for errors and deficiencies so that you don't end up with buggy software products. The goal is to continue testing and fixing problems until your software meets specifications and successfully resolves the original problem. Here are some testing tips:

• Simultaneous tests. Test, track, and fix bugs simultaneously as your team develops the software, using automated tests to help as appropriate.

• Pair programming. Multiple people must review all written code, with cross-checks integrated by at least two developers.

• Final test. When your team has completed all the software features and production is ready, you still need another round of in-depth testing. One option is to release the product to a small group of beta testers and monitor their usage.

Improve communication

To increase the likelihood of achieving the desired end product, communicate the overall project objectives to the entire development team. Make sure developers understand their own individual goals, tasks, and responsibilities, while also seeing how they relate to other team members' goals and the overall project.

Identify a set of criteria to ensure all tasks are fully completed in terms of functionality and quality. This common definition lets your entire team know exactly what it means when someone says they have “completed” a feature, reducing the need to reopen completed tasks due to unmet criteria.

Emphasize that it is preferable to take more time to complete a task just once than to revisit it multiple times to make corrections. Additional methods for improving team communication include:

• Identify which communication channel to use for each purpose.
• Holding daily meetings to allow developers to synchronize their efforts.
• Have a single point of contact between the development team and project stakeholders.

Reevaluate your team

Reassess your team before starting development to ensure everyone has the knowledge needed to make the project successful. Provide training, if necessary, to expand your developers' skills and help them learn new techniques. Make sure your team is excited about the project so they care about the quality of the results. Once the project begins, use the following methods to measure team productivity:

• Sprint burn-down reports. If you are using Agile, at the end of each sprint determine which tasks are “to be started”, “unfinished” or “done”. To ensure this information is useful, don't allow developers to set artificially low goals or report tasks completed when they are not.

• Speed ​​metric. Pay attention to each developer's reasons for speed. While longer speed times can reflect knowledge and skill issues, they can also be the result of a strong commitment to best practices, code quality, and testing.

• Cycle times. Examine how long it takes developers to resolve issues, how many issues arise at the same time, and how many issues are pending, in progress, and completed.

• Transfer rate. Determine the number of tasks, errors, and features that developers complete to provide a comprehensive view of the overall workload over a given period.

Outsource software development

The best choice for your company's software development may be to outsource projects or grow your IT team . With these approaches, you gain access to a large group of experts who have the right skills for your specific project, as well as experience in choosing the most efficient process for your needs. You will also receive ongoing technical support with post-launch updates and maintenance.

Outsourcing can save you money on overhead, benefits, training, and onboarding required to maintain a full-time in-house team, as you only pay for software development when you need it. Using this approach, you can free up your employees to focus on your core business functions to drive growth and expansion.

An ideal development process leads to good results

If you take steps to optimize your company's software development process, whether in-house or through outsourcing, you will increase the chances of a successful product. Steps like choosing the right development methodology, setting aside time for testing, and improving team communication can help you achieve the desired result.