Maximising the Value of Software Development: Essential Strategies for Business Owners
Investing in custom software development is a smart decision for many large businesses, but it's important to ensure you're getting the most value out of your investment. In this article, we'll discuss a few strategies that business owners can use to ensure that their custom software development project stays on track and delivers maximum value to the business. By implementing these strategies, you can improve the quality of your software, ensure that it meets your business needs, and avoid costly mistakes that could damage your business.
Feature roadmap
When building software it’s easy to get caught up in continuously building new features reactively if you don’t have a clear direction. This is why it’s essential that you always have a list of features, prioritised by business value, that will help you and your team avoid getting sidetracked with non-essential work and remain focused on your ‘why.’
Your roadmap is like a GPS that helps your team navigate the development journey. Everyone from the CEO to software developer should have an up-to-date copy so everyone understands the project direction and what they’re working towards.
Since business needs are always evolving, you'll likely need to keep adjusting your roadmap. We recommend that the management team review it regularly, at least quarterly, to ensure it still aligns with your business goals. Don’t forget to share the updated version with everyone!
Invest in a project manager
Building software is complex and it requires a dedicated technical project manager to keep things running smoothly. Your project manager (PM) acts as the bridge between the business and the development team and ensures that the project is moving forward based on your feature roadmap. This person should have experience in software development (as well as the software development lifecycle) and has the ability to handle issues as they arise during the development process
They’ll act as your eyes and ears during the development process, ensuring that your project stays on track.
Ensure you have automated tests
We feel strongly about this! It’s imperative that a test suite is being developed alongside your software product. As your software grows, it becomes easier for the team to accidentally introduce costly bugs and errors which can end up harming your business. A test suite is designed to catch these issues early on in the development process before they are released to your users and cause damage to your business. It automatically ‘tests’ that your software is working correctly without the need to pay someone to manually test it every time a change is made.
To stress the importance even further, if you don’t write tests it’s difficult to implement them later. Tests must always be written in tandem with the software.
To ensure that your development team has a test suite in place, you should ask them if they have a process for testing their code. They should be able to explain to you what types of tests they run and how they go about testing new features or changes. If they do not have a testing process in place, you should ask them to develop one immediately as part of their development process.
Measure progress using project management tools
When building software your team needs somewhere online to organise all of their work. Webbernet utilises a tool called Shortcut but there are other project management tools out there such as Jira or Trello that are suitable.
If you’re working with an external development team make sure that the team gives you access to their project management tool so you can monitor the development progress.
Provide feedback as much as possible
Providing feedback as much as possible is critical to the success of a software project. Timely feedback enables the developers to make adjustments quickly and avoid potential delays or costly mistakes. It also ensures that the software development process remains aligned with the business goals and objectives.
If you don’t have a strong planning process then your project manager needs to continually check the work of your developers during the building process and provide feedback. There is nothing worse than waiting weeks for a feature only to find that it’s not built to your specifications.
Implementing these strategies will not only help you get the most out of your software development but will also ensure that your software aligns with your business goals. By having a clear roadmap, investing in a project manager, building automated tests, using project management tools, and providing feedback as much as possible, you'll set your team up for success and ultimately save time and money in the long run. Remember to continually review and adjust your strategies as your business needs evolve.