There are several highly-effective ways to speed up the custom software development process. Amidst growing client demand, global companies are looking to expedite and accelerate development operations to achieve a rapid time-to-market. Of course, this is known to impose a first-mover advantage against major industry competitors in terms of downloads, sales, and revenues. As a software development team leader, speeding up the SDLC is not always a straightforward, easy process. Fortunately, it can offer massive potential benefits that extend across your software engineering workforce. After all, secure processes improve your reputation, showcase your skills, and protect your data. To get started now, read on to learn how to speed up custom software development processes.
Optimize Your Development Team
First off, you can seriously speed up custom software development processes with simple team optimization. To promote speed, agility, and flexibility, create a team of versatile, skilled, and qualified professionals. By employing experienced engineers with extensive expertise, you can drastically reduce the chance of delay-causing mistakes. Once your team structure is organized, set realistic deadlines for software development, release, and deployment operations. After all, overworked, burnt-out, or exhausted programmers are more likely to make mistakes or even quit projects. Don’t rely on team expansion in an effort to speed up the process. After all, new team members require time-consuming onboard training which can divert workers away from their responsibilities.
Adopt DevOps Methodologies
Next, adopt DevOps methodologies to successfully speed up the custom software development process. It is reported that businesses that build software using DevOps regularly outperform the competition. After all, these methodologies speed up development cycles, reduce delivery deadlines, improve communication. Working with DevOps, you’ll have the opportunity to leverage a wide range of powerful tools and software development technologies. For example, you can use a JFrog Cargo Registry to natively support repositories and enable full control of dependency resolution. These platforms offer an enterprise-ready, universal, and cloud-native build solution. Certainly, adopt DevOps methodologies to speed up the software development process with reliability, flexibility, and agility.
Manage Technical Debt
Furthermore, you can certainly manage technical debt to strategically speed up custom software development processes. Businesses regularly incur technical debt when using shortcuts, or “cutting corners.” They’ll try to release a buggy, defect-ridden software just to push to the market quickly. Ultimately, you can seriously manage and reduce technical debt by analyzing and measuring it. First, divide remediation costs by total development expenses. Then, multiply that amount by 100 to get your technical debt ratio. If your ratio is 5% or less, it is still manageable. If it is anything over, immediate action is needed. Consider managing technical debt by cutting costs elsewhere throughout your pipeline. For example, you can run automated tests, purchase affordable project management tools, or install issue trackers.
Reduce Process Complexity
Next, reduce or eliminate process complexity in a concentrated effort to speed up software development. Every software development project will hit a challenge at least once during the SDLC. Fortunately, these can be reduced with a few effective, yet simple techniques. For a start, you can reduce technical complexity by managing and controlling issues. In addition, you should set clear requirements so your team knows what’s ahead. It may also help to create a secure incident response (IR) policy for team members to employ whenever they encounter an issue. If ignored, problems related to architecture and integration can cause bigger, more time-consuming challenges down the road. Of course, some level of complications and confusion are bound to happen.
Leverage The Lean Approach
You may also want to consider leveraging the lean approach to speed up your custom software development pipeline. This approach guides your team to optimize processes with the limited development time and resources available at your disposal. This helps you reduce waste and focus on what project aspects truly need attention. Leveraging this approach, you’ll be encouraged to build in short increments with consistent user feedback. This way, you can design, develop, and update software applications without rework. Plus, you can use all the given feedback and information to make adjustments throughout the development lifecycle.
There are several steps you can follow to speed up your custom software development process. First, optimize your development team by hiring skilled, experienced programmers. Next, try and adopt DevOps to keep costs low and boost internal team collaboration. In addition, reduce process complexity with a security incident response plan. At the same time, it will help to leverage the lean approach to custom software development. Furthermore, manage technical debt by cutting costs strategically across your pipeline. Follow the points above to learn about how to speed up your custom software development process.