Lightning-fast software development is possible. Really. You’ll be able to put out software in days – not weeks – when your developers are able to align every piece of code with a business goal, you’ve filled the deficiencies in your processes and technology, and your people are supported by experts. Once these pieces come together, you’ll start seeing net new revenue in months – not years.
Faster software development isn’t just about tech. Tal Frankfurt, Founder and CEO of Cloud for Good suggests, “creating transformational value should be the end goal for any technology implementation. When considering the impact a digital transformation can generate, the focus should be placed on value creation, not just the cost of the technology. Ask yourself this: What’s the true cost of postponing your digital transformation?”
5 Essentials for Faster Software Development
Strategic Alignment
Strategic alignment between the C-Suite and your development team is an absolute must for successful software development. How do you achieve this? Start by creating a strategic product roadmap to align business objectives with technology milestones.
Development tends to be segregated from the rest of the organization due to the perception that developers speak a different language. Developers do see the world in code, 1s and 0s, while the rest of the organization is looking at problems through the lenses of finance, revenue, risk mitigation and business goals. This creates a disconnect because software developers don’t tend to think in financial terms, which is the primary language of the C-suite.
However, without the context of the financial strategy and the business motivation behind your feature requests and modernization efforts, all developers see is a to-do list without rationale.
We have to start aligning feature requests with business goals and strategies while making sure the software developers understand the motivation behind the features before they begin coding; all of which we do with PlatformPlus®.
The Right People, Processes, and Technology
Success requires having the right people, processes, and technology in place. How do you get there? Take the time to do a thorough evaluation of where you are now in terms of development, along with where you need to be for success. Perform a line-by-line accounting of the skill gaps, tech debt, and roadblocks that you need to clear to get where you want to be.
Clear Requirements
A major reason for the complexity of software projects is the constant changing of requests and requirements. One-third of the respondents of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey consider building products with unspecific requirements as their biggest challenge.
You have to tie every line of code and every feature request to a business goal so you can help your developers understand their worth in the business.
When a developer just gets a set of features to build out, they don’t understand what those features are supposed to accomplish for the customers or for the business. This greatly limits any sense of accomplishment, ownership, or pride when a developer doesn’t understand what they’re helping to achieve. All we leave our developers with is a sense of pride in their technical chops, which can lead to overcomplicated solutions – known as technical scope creep.
Think of it like this:
You request a feature.
Your developers want to go above and beyond, and really flex their technical abilities.
Your developers learn new skills and add bells and whistles to your software product that aren’t really relevant to the business goal. This leads to overtime, late nights, and weekend work – it also leads to blown budgets and missed delivery dates.
Consider for a moment the Microsoft Word ribbon. Running as a header at the top of the screen, you will find a bunch of different tabs, but you probably only use around 20% of those features. This is a perfect example of a product that went rogue and got totally out of control with features to keep the team busy. Why add unnecessary features if they don’t support the functionality of the product?
Overcommitment is a big problem when we don’t give clear direction and requirements. Instead, tie every line of code to a business goal. When developers feel a sense of pride coming from the IMPACT of their technology – at the customer level and at the business level – instead of the technical capabilities they can show off, projects stop failing and start moving faster.
Experienced Leadership, Support, and Expertise
You need to have the heavy-lift engineers, software architects, and UX/UI designers ready to provide knowledge and know-how to your project. You can hire these roles out at great expense, but your existing team is actually capable of doing most of the things you need them to do – if they have the right development environment and leadership to help them get across the finish line. Speaking of which . . .
Development Environment
If you want to speed up software development, you need the right development environment! You need a PaaS (platform as a service) that prioritizes building software RIGHT the first time – not “failing fast” and wasting time with revision after revision. PlatformPlus® provides this environment for your developers which will set you up for success from the start.
Today, you give your developers some requirements or goals and let them decide how to get you there. That’s your status quo. If you’re reading this, you’ve realized that isn’t really good enough anymore. Now imagine surrounding yourself and your developers with experts in software architecture, heavy engineering, and product design who can give you and your dev team the right guidance at the right time in just the right way to maximize development speed and minimize risk. This is what the “Plus” in PlatformPlus® gives you.
It’s really more about failing EARLY, not failing fast.
By giving clear requirements and defining the business goals motivating those requirements, you will set yourself up for success. As long as you’ve given clear requirements to your development team, they can fail, iterate, and pivot toward the correct solution early in the process. This is infinitely better than waiting for the project to be fully developed and saying, “Nope, this isn’t it!”
That only leads to a demoralized and defensive developer.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with failing fast, as long as you have a strategy in mind. If you fail on your way to your established destination – a concrete business goal – you can realign your tactics and try again.
If you want to realize revenue faster, you need to develop software more effectively, more efficiently, and significantly faster to take advantage of ever-tightening windows of opportunity in the marketplace.
Time is money
You can drain your software development budget with revision after revision, or by trying to out-hire every skill gap.
Or . . . you can get PlatformPlus® and accomplish everything you need to build revenue and scale your software company with the team you already have. Start seeing ROI on your software development so you can grow.