Startups whether it’s big or small, always adopt the latest software development industry trends and dedicatedly follow them to survive the competition.
Advanced Technologies and software development process automation to improve work, offer quality and deliver better services and products to their clients/customers. The software development industry is highly volatile and rapidly adapt to changes in the working environment.
However, to keep growing a web development company in USA should manage the technology correctly and face the software development challenges with proper strategies.
Often people think that software development is not a big game! Yeah, they might be true, but the software development challenges of startups are at different levels.
Projects involving cloud computing, product enhancement and upgrades, in-house products and services development, web-based solutions, mobile application development, etc. using the latest tech are the biggest challenges in the software development industry, especially for the startups.
Going further, let’s take a look at some challenges every software product developer or company faces. The software development problems and solutions are as follows:
Globalization: A Biggest Software Development Challenge
If your business relates to the software industry, then you are either building software solutions or offering software services. Global competitions often force businesses to redefine their product’s design by integrating new feature functionalities for retaining their position in the market.
Correct project management plays an important role in any new software company; otherwise, it might affect the client-company relationship. Finally, you might lose the project!
SaaS: Not a Software Development Problem, But a Solution
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform helps small and mid-sized businesses to avail extensive enterprise level capabilities. Companies are shifting their gears to SaaS application development due to its reliability in building robust, flexible, scalable and user-friendly applications.
Thus, with an excellent team of developers and designers in USA, a software development startup can redirect a large chunk of investment on SaaS which in return give more value to your business strategies.
“SaaS is a business’s-friendly technology that works for practical innovation, cloud development services and gives real-life benefits to customers and users.”
Software Testing: Quality control
A product or service has value only when it’s tested thoroughly for errors, bugs, and defects. Being, reliable is an important criterion for a company in the software development industry.
A Project manager, therefore, focuses upon implementing powerful quality tests to ensure the project deliverables. Several types of tests ensure the quality of the software. Some of them are as follows:
- Unit Testing
- Functional Testing
- Integration Testing
- System Testing
- Performance Testing
- Stress Testing
- Usability Testing
- Regression Testing
- Acceptance Testing
- Beta Testing
Testing is among those challenges every software product developer faces to produce bug-free software. A Project manager must know every testing method of development platforms like web-based apps, mobile applications, and cloud services based apps, etc.
Project Reporting: A Common Offshore Software Development Challenge
If project reports are not appropriately conveyed to the clients, then a sudden rise in tension between a software development company in USA and client might put a project to halt.
Thus, as a startup focuses on keeping reports daily with these:
- Project Status Report: A report containing the project’s overall health.
- Time-sheet Report: Monitor resource availability for the tasks in development.
- Resource Workload Report: It schedule resource across different projects and measure budget impacts.
- Expense Report: It provides insights to the client about their investments.
- Portfolio Report: To capture clients, give your samples as a portfolio to them.
- Risk Reports: Detailing all the involved risks in a project along with their solutions.
- Board/Executive Reports: A weekly status updates which directly goes to your project team and important business stakeholders.
Third-Part Integration Challenges Affecting Software Project Management
Technologies keep on updating, and software development companies tap their potentials to build third-party integration modules that offer pre-defined functionality. These modules reduce the development time and safely integrate into the existing systems. This can increase all the stress levels because managers are forced to invest a particular time in understanding how the modules work.
Custom software development project must be regularly monitored by the startups to avoid all the biggest challenges in software development projects as discussed above. The monitoring process consumes a lot of time, but interaction with various individuals in the team of your software development company.
Top 10 Challenges in Software Development
Software Development is the instruments of administration, management, and planning for an enterprise. The expectations are sky-high. An Application should function smoothly, cater to each need of a company, integrate multiple systems of the company, be secure and give back a considerable return on investment (ROI).
Challenges on the road of Enterprise Application Development
Developing an Enterprise Application is a scrupulous job. It requires precision, vision, and expertise. The challenges can be many but it’s important to be aware of them to get the right product.
Here is a list of probable challenges in the way of Enterprise Application Development-
Also Read: What Makes A Good Web Development Company?
Changing Business Requirements and Environments
- The landscape of a business might change, sometimes completely. There can be technological transformation taking place. Or there can be economic disruptions.
- The path that a company follows might change owing to feedback and analysis. This simply means new workflows and requirements have to be implemented.
- Or in special cases, there can be a merger or acquisition. In that case, it all becomes a mammoth task integrating the two systems into a common Enterprise Application.
- Enterprise Applications are complicated and changing.
Shifting to the mobile platform
- More Enterprise Applications want to go mobile. The global market for enterprise mobility is projected to reach US$218 billion this year.
- Mobility and cloud-computing accelerate faster than the desktop counterparts and your company might lose relevance if you aren’t going mobile with your applications.
- Mobility increases productivity and leads to faster decision-making. This is because information can be captured fast using mobile and can be shared instantaneously.
- Employees and customers enjoy mobility and it’s surely more of a necessity now than empowerment. Such a requirement will most definitely reach your business, if not already. The challenge is to make the transition to mobile easy by including the essential functions on the mobile platform, without creating a heavy mobile-application. A lot of testing is required to get the layouts and fields right so that everything fits the mobile format easily.
Security
Security for your software development begins with controlling user access and securing the resources of the application. There are various services in a software development like user-interface services, Operating System services, Business Process Services, etc. Controlling user access simply means restricting the usage of these services to authorized users.
- A strong defense system is a primary requirement that includes encryption and firewalls at application, host and network level.
- Enterprise Data is of utmost importance to a company. Use competent security software to install and maintain security. Make sure the privacy of sensitive user information is protected.
- Web applications like a mobile application or cloud-based software are prone to cyber-attacks and breaches. This is because an increased number of networks lead to more vulnerability like unknown users, cookies, etc. Make sure your security software is competent to protect all aspects of the web application.
- The software must be updated with the latest security patches. The same security levels must be implemented across all platforms.
Interoperability
- It is required that systems in an Enterprise are well-linked with each other. For example, Leave Management System and Payroll System must be linked for consistency across all functions. Similarly, a Customer Management System will be using data from the Sales System.
- Enterprise Applications is a web of neatly linked functions across different sub-systems.
- There should be a smart link between applications that use the same set of data to achieve optimization in an Enterprise Application.
- Interoperability standards should be followed to achieve effortless sharing and usage of data.
- Careful design is necessary especially for heterogeneous environments that involve disparate systems
User Interface and Experience
Is functionality everything? No. If an Enterprise Application has a basic user interface, employees might not enjoy using the software. If consumer apps can have sleek interfaces, why not an Enterprise Application?
The importance of beautifully designed, comfortable user-interface should not be underestimated as it can result in greater and impactful engagement, ultimately extracting more value from the same software.
Adding small details to the application to make navigation and accessibility easier can have big results in terms of employee satisfaction and productivity.
Low ROI
Enterprise Application Development, as mentioned before, needs expertise and detailed planning. It’s a costly affair and the expenses don’t stop there. There are high maintenance costs and expenditures like in creating and sending regular updates. But, a feeling of disdain comes when the costly development and maintenance doesn’t bring in the expected results.
The aim of an Enterprise Application can be to improve the sales cycle, increase the productivity of the employees or to smoothen and optimize internal processes.
The goal should be clear and it should be reflected in the design and development of the Enterprise Application.
Regular measurements and comparisons need to be done to know the real value of your Enterprise Application.
Time and Cost
Software and Web Application Development can be a time taking process if the approach isn’t clear. It can take months to develop an Application, sometimes 5-6 months.
Incorporating and integrating various systems of a company takes time. Half-a-year, on an average, is a long time period, especially when you want to get started with an Enterprise Application quickly. But, is the solution?
A Modular architecture is an answer to this problem. Modular Architecture uses pre-made blocks of code (ready-made functionalities) that are customized according to the needs of an organization and linked together accordingly. This can cut short time by one-third; thereby you can save a lot of time and thus money.
Maintainability
Maintainability is as crucial as developing an Application. It is not just limited to operating the product but also detecting defects and correcting them quickly.
Maintainability should not be a cumbersome job. The adaptability to new environments and future-requirement should not be a stressful process.
Also, maintenance should be a fast process. You don’t want to be in a situation where you are spending US$ 3000 per year on maintenance and yet it is a time-taking process.
Modular architecture again makes life much easier. For example, if you wish to make changes or correct a fault in ERP system, Modular Architecture makes sure that the Content Management System, that is independent of the ERP system, is not at all affected. This all leads to easy maintainability.
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