10 Questions For An Effective Software Development Strategy

The software development strategy is part of the software strategy, which, in turn, aligns with the wider business strategy and goals. A well-structured software development strategy streamlines processes, ensuring efficiency, cost-effectiveness, adaptability, and quality outcomes.

Utilizing LTS Group’s hands-on experience in software development and consulting industry experts, we compiled a guide to creating the most effective software development strategies.

Let’s explore!

What Is A Software Development Strategy?

A software development strategy outlines the approach, methods, and steps used to create and manage software development. This strategy helps set clear objectives, allocate resources, and define the processes and methodologies to follow for efficient and successful software development.

The software development strategy is a significant component of the broader software strategy, which often includes decisions on software usage, acquisition, development, integration, and maintenance within the business strategy.

Related: Product development strategy

Why Do We Need A Software Development Strategy?

The most significant role of a software development strategy is to specify the dos and don’ts in a software development life cycle (SDLC), combined with a project specification serving as a benchmark for all stakeholders.

From that, software development strategies bring in the following benefits:

• Ensure that all stakeholders have a clear view of the project before starting.
• Avoid costly errors caused by misunderstanding or miscommunication.
• Minimize risks of delays in software delivery because of underestimation or miscoordination.
• Facilitate the most streamlined and efficient SDLC, enabling cost-saving and faster time-to-market.
• Ensure the software’s quality as well as its alignment with the overall business strategy.

Answering 10 Questions For The Best Software Development Strategy

Below are 10 strategic questions to guide you to successful software strategies.

1. Why do you develop this software?

As always, start with a reason: what problems are you trying to solve and what business goals do you want to achieve through this project?

By keeping the project’s goals in mind, you make sure that the software development strategy, and eventually, the software, aligns with your overall business strategies and goals.

2. Who is your user?

Be it an internal app or a client-facing app, specifying users’ personas and expectations is a must to define the right functional and non-functional aspects of the software.

If it’s an internal app, users are your employees. In this case, you should at least understand the context, or the processes that your employees go through, as well as their tech-savvy level.

In the case of client-facing apps, knowing who are your target users, their pain points, behaviors, and expectations when using the app is vital to staying competitive.

3. What will be the priority attributes of your application?

You should identify important attributes of your application and sort them by priority levels.

The priority list then serves as a guide for software design, software development, and resource allocation. Based on that, your software designer knows what to prioritize, and sometimes, trade-off, while the development team focuses on the most critical aspects during the software development process, and the QA team knows what to set an eye on.

4. What resources and constraints are there?

Knowing your resources and constraints aids in decisions regarding insourcing or outsourcing, software development methodology, project management style, and so on. It also impacts your budget allocation and the project timeline.

For example, if you are facing a time constraint that demands a quick product launch, adopting agile methodology and considering IT outsourcing could be beneficial. These strategies allow for faster SDLC and leveraging external expertise to meet tight deadlines.

5. So, will you develop software in-house or outsource?

You already know your resources and constraints, it’s time to decide between insourcing and outsourcing.

An SDLC asks for various capabilities, ranging from analysis, design, and prototype to development, testing, and deployment. Furthermore, specific projects may call for expertise in modern technologies such as AI, cloud, big data, and DevOps practices. Typically, the larger the project scope, the more quantitative and qualitative aspects are required.

Given you have a seasoned team of software developers and abundant time-to-market (resources), you also require high confidentiality for the project (constraint), in-house development is an obvious choice.

But what if your team faces a quantitative and/or qualitative shortage? Outsourcing software development emerges as the viable resolution to pursue.

6. What software development methodology should you use?

Another contributing factor to a successful software development strategy is the software development approach, or software development methodology.

The two best models for software development are waterfall and agile.

Author’s comments:

Although these two methodologies seem separated, stakeholders should prepare for a combination of waterfall and agile, especially in large projects.

Picture this, when building a big house, we use the waterfall approach to fix the floor area, the number of floors, and other structural elements, as changes to these factors are costly and sometimes impossible. Then, for interior design and furnishing, or even the number of rooms on each floor, where preferences might change, the agile approach can be applied.

Same with a large software development project!

Typically, large projects embrace the waterfall approach to define fundamental scopes and the priority quality attributes, then can adopt the agile methodology when breaking down each scope into smaller pieces and implementing them.

Another notable trend is that startups, small companies, and product companies tend to favor the agile approach for experiments and innovation.

7. Once outsourcing, how to manage IT outsourcing projects?

Given you choose to outsource software development, here are our recommendations for approaching and managing your IT outsourcing project effectively.

Identify what to outsource

As an SDLC encompasses various phases, asking for a wide range of capabilities and expertise, it’s essential to decide if you will outsource completely or partially.

Choose your vendor wisely

When it comes to IT outsourcing vendor selection criteria, here are the key ones we recommend:

• Their experience and expertise
• Trustworthiness
• Pricing options
• Timeline guarantee
• Understanding of your business goals
• Security and confidentiality practices

Choose the right project management practices

To effectively manage the project from your side, even with low efforts, you can consider:

• Ensure all project members are clear about the project requirements and goals.
• Set clear and achievable milestones to ensure productivity while eliminating the hassles of micromanagement.
• Establish a convenient communication protocol and reporting schedules that work effectively with the time-zone barriers.
• Use project management software as a collaborative platform to manage the project’s progress.
• Sync up regularly to effectively motivate members and speed up the development process.

Related: A comprehensive guide for IT outsourcing

8. How can you cut costs and save resources?

There are many viable practices to cut costs out there. Still, some come with opportunity costs and risks. You should comprehensively assess the “gain and pain” of each solution both temporary and long-term.

Below are common cost-cutting practices:

• Introduce quality assurance (QA) and testing early as fixing bugs in the initial stages tends to cost less.
• Optimize your software development team strategy with proper structure, seniority levels, and resource allocation.
• In offshoring development, define the right offshore software development strategy, such as taking pricing advantages of affordable offshore countries like Vietnam and partnering with an experienced offshore software development company for offshore development center setup.
• If what you lack is some specific skill sets, consider IT staff augmentation instead of outsourcing the whole project or hiring a full software team.
• Opt for open-source technologies, while paying attention to the resource readiness, cost of support, and security concerns.
• Utilize cloud services for storage infrastructure (IaaS) and specific technology solutions (BPaaS, PaaS) that would otherwise require significant time and resources to develop.

9. How can you speed up development?

Proper project management that we discussed above is a key to effective software development. Furthermore, there are technical solutions we can adopt to speed up the process.

Choose the right technology platform

Proper and supportive technical tools, such as programming languages, frameworks, patterns, APIs, etc. will help streamline the development process, optimize efficiency, and reduce manual workloads.

Apply automation

Applying automation to software testing and development will facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to expedite the development process.

Popular tools and processes of automation are:

• Test automation
• DevOps
• Deployment pipelines

Utilize containerization

Implement containerization technologies like Docker or Kubernetes to create portable and consistent development environments. This allows for smoother deployment and scaling of applications, enhancing efficiency and consistency across different stages of development.

Keep an eye on end-goals

Today’s technology landscape and user tastes can change faster than you can even notice. These, combined with an agile approach that welcomes changes, can lead to a never-ending project.

Whenever you prioritize urgent over recent, don’t forget to weigh the pains and gains, while keeping in mind that adding changes will disrupt your development flow. Then, you make a wise decision that best aligns with your end goals.

10. Does your application need to comply with industry-specific standards?

Adherence to industry-specific standards is paramount, especially in sectors like finance, healthcare, or legal. Understanding the unique regulatory landscape and compliance requirements within your industry is essential. It shapes the direction of your software development strategy, guiding decisions on architecture, data handling, and security protocols.

Frequently Asked Questions About Software Development Strategy

What is a software development strategy example?

An example of a software development strategy is the implementation of Agile methodology. Suppose your startup business wants to test the market demand, you embrace an agile software development approach to quickly start and build a minimum viable product (MVP) to validate your hypothesis on the users’ needs as well as gain more insights into users’ desires.

What are the processes in software development?

As there are two common software development methodologies: waterfall and agile, there exist two different SDLCs as below.

A traditional waterfall SDLC typically consists of 7 steps:

• Planning and requirement analysis
• Defining requirements
• Designing the product architecture and prototyping
• Software development
• Software testing
• Deployment
• Operations and maintenance

Meanwhile, a standard agile SDLC consists of 4 major phases:

• Conceptualization & Inception
• Iteration (planning, execution, review, and backlog refinement)
• Release
• Maintenance

Check out: Top 10 agile software development companies

Final Notes

We’ve gone through the most vital practices and strategies for software development based on LTS Group’s hands-on experience in software development outsourcing services. Should you want further discussion on the topic or need a free consultation for your next software project, don’t hesitate to talk to our experts!

• Website: https://ltsgroup.tech/
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