Companies constantly face the challenge of reducing time-to-market to ensure they will not lose market share, moreover they strive to achieve competitive advantage and be the first ones. They have to quickly adapt their products to changing conditions and requirements. This challenge has made time the most valuable resource for most of the software development teams. They all try to meet deadlines for product releases and in order to meet this goal, they always aspire to speed up software development pace. But how? How can companies speed up software development without sacrificing quality?
Set clear requirements and roadmap
Having a clear goal, scope and requirements makes the development faster, avoiding having many meetings and misunderstandings. While they’re still going to be some challenges along the way, at least developers won’t have to rewrite the code.
Limit your work in progress (WIP)
One thing that helps developers make the development process more efficient is limiting the amount of work in progress, normally to one. When there are too many tasks, things tend to get overwhelming. Teams that are overwhelmed with a high number of tasks tend to work slowly.
Automate
Automated testing is probably the best way to reach a compromise between speed and quality. Thanks to the repeating scripts, anyone can run tests in regression without the need to repeat the same steps manually. It gives more time for working on the new features as the old ones are being checked automatically.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development approach, according to which every developer in the team merges code changes in a central repository several times a day. Continuous Delivery is the practice of automating the software release process. Implementing a CI/CD pipeline can significantly increase development speed due to lots of factors. It removes manual errors, provides instant feedback, and enables fast iteration.
MVP
Another approach that speeds up product development is to start small and steadily progress through multiple stages or iterations. Building a minimum viable product (MVP) before taking a deep dive into end-to-end product development is always a good idea to collect first feedback and get market approval. Moreover, end-users typically use only up to 20% of a product’s functionality, so it’s not only easier and faster but also reasonable to plan the development of that minimum first.
Require solid product documentation
Every project should be documented, including how the product has been developed, the supported features, any problems, etc. Investing some time in documentation upfront will help speed up the development process in the long run, especially if the product is growing.
Solid product documentation helps track the project’s progress and onboard new team members. It also helps everyone involved stay on the same page. If stakeholders have a question, they can consult with it instead of asking and interrupting the programmers or PM.
Outsource software development
One of the most common ways to attain high-quality software development at high speeds is to outsource the process to a software development company. The company takes care of the different processes that need to be cut down or added to improve the development speed.
Use tools
Instead of developing some functionalities from scratch reinventing the wheel, investigate first, most probably such functionality/tool already exists. For example, instead of developing a login system for 2 weeks, just integrate VYou in one day.
Every developer faces numerous challenges during the working process. These complexities may be associated with the technical side of the project (such as complex software architecture, third-party integrations, innovation, and so on), project requirements (unclear goals and objectives), unreasonable deadlines (e.g. when the estimated project length does not match with the actual scope of work), structural mismatches and internal issues within the company, etc. Software production becomes even more challenging when the team has to deal with several complexities at once. The more problems they have, the slower the development speed will be.
Request VYou Demo to know how it can speed up software development part of the access management system while maintaining quality.
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