5 Tips on How to Speed Up Software Development

Software development is a complex business that requires the cooperation of several people, procedures, and resources. When one gear in this complex mechanism fails, the whole machine stops, slowing down the entire development process.

We’ll look at the most common problems that slow down product development and give you advice based on what we’ve learned about how to fix them.

What does software development speed depend on?

The process of software development is complex. In addition, it is constantly being rethought or retooled to incorporate new components. Unlike the manufacturing or production sectors, bringing in additional people or resources does not always result in longer development times. Because no other engineering discipline uses as much intellectual capital as software programming. Software development can be the most knowledge-intensive technical specialty.

The software development process consists of people, processes, and tools. The math behind accelerated progress is simple. Assuming everything else is normal, you can slow down the process while increasing the pace of the components that speed it up, or vice versa.

Complexity

This concept requires minimal explanation, but let’s look at it from a new perspective.

In the early days of game development, when consoles like the Atari 2600 were popular, it was normal for a single developer to create an entire game in a couple of months. Now, it can take a team of hundreds of highly skilled developers years to finish a huge triple-A game like Red Dead Redemption 2.

This is because the complexity and scale of such programs have grown by many orders of magnitude over the previous few decades. And this is true not only for games but for any application in general.

Development teams face a wide range of challenges during the development cycle. The greater the complexity of the project, the more obstacles developers face when they try to speed up the process. There are three types of project complexity that can hinder progress:

• Requirements complexity: Before starting to work with a custom software development company, it is very important to have a clear idea of the required features of the project.
• The complexity of technologies: Some tasks require creating a solution from scratch, integrating with other systems, or using specialized software architecture.
• Structure complexity: Coordinating, managing, and controlling the creation of a product gets harder when there are many different processes, resources, and people involved.

People

Employees are the company’s most valuable asset. However, they do not work smoothly and constantly with the same high efficiency level. Employees may take vacations to rest, in which case the pace of software development sometimes slows down.

Another problem that can slow down the time it takes to build software is the size of the development team. The overall success of the team is determined by the work of each individual member, but larger teams do not necessarily provide better results. Effective internal communication is crucial to the successful execution of any project.

For example, at Dashdevs, we value the fact that our developers get along well with each other. Because we are careful about who we hire, we have put together dedicated teams whose members can work well together. Over time, satisfaction with their work and clients grows.

If you have more than seven people in your development team, it can be difficult to agree on the division of responsibilities. The solution to this problem is to hire an experienced project manager.

Framework

A framework is a structure that allows developers to write code and speeds up the creation of new applications. It can serve as the basis for some useful software products. With this strategy, it is not necessary to start a new project from scratch, and more possible to accelerate software development.

Each framework is suitable for a specific set of languages and is often associated with a specific programming language. They are very different. Angular, React JS, and Vue JS are popular frameworks for making user interfaces, or frontends. There is also back-end server software such as Ruby on Rails, Spring Boot, or Django. Java, React Native, and Flutter are examples of mobile frameworks.

Choosing a framework that your team is not familiar with can have a big negative impact on the development pace.

Resources

Even minor changes in the project scope or requirements can lead to a significant increase in its complexity. To do this, there must also be major changes to the software architecture and the overall design of the project.

What should software development firms avoid when they are wondering how to develop software faster?

The project scope grows out of control, which means that more features and functions are added than were originally planned.

When requirements change too often without careful discussion with the team, the speed of development can slow down a lot.

Code Quality

Development pace and code quality are often at opposite ends of the spectrum. If the timeliness of the project is emphasized above its importance, the quality of the code suffers.

When the development team has a significant backlog of work and wants to speed up software development, they may strive to complete everything as quickly as possible. It’s more likely that tests will be ignored, shortcuts will be used, and the overall quality and clarity of the code will be compromised.

Glitches are inevitable, no matter how fast the project progresses in the beginning. And this requires a complete rewrite of a part of the code, not just a few changes. In addition, such stress can make your engineers stressed out and cause them to lose confidence and passion for the project.

The most important thing to remember in the software development process is the need for comprehensive planning, code review, and testing, especially when it comes to large projects.

Sprint vs. Marathon Mindset in Software Development

Every digital company wants to speed up software development process. Though people often understand speed differently. The difference between sprint speed and endurance speed (marathon) is significant. The analogy between a sprint and a marathon is perfect. When it comes to code development or running a race, you can’t do both. Consider an arbitrary unit of effort, such as a point. You can score 100 points in Sprint mode if you work overtime for a month and give your best. My first point is the following:

On a long product roadmap, the sprint pace is simply impossible to maintain.

You can maintain a pace of 100 items per month for three to six months, but you can hardly maintain it for a whole year. In addition, fast software development significantly increases the pullback.

The goal is to cover as much ground as possible in the fewest number of years. This, after all, is the goal of the marathon. You have to be patient and consistent.

How can you build software faster over a longer period of time? That’s the million-dollar question. While the actual response will vary from company to company, we can still build a pretty good preliminary model that can be useful.

5 ways to speed up your software development process

Dashdevs was started more than 16 years ago as a company that makes software for clients worldwide. During this time, we’ve learned a lot about how to manage projects in a way that works well.

We have developed a list of the five best strategies to accelerate software development cycle. Enjoy!

Plan with testable milestones

An execution plan is the “how to” in business. It is an important part of your company’s strategy, presentation, and financial plan. It should also be something that you and your team use regularly to manage the firm, communicate the most important goals and deadlines, and enjoy the results of your efforts.

These milestones will be divided into additional stages for your internal team, and their length and width may vary greatly depending on the structure of your firm. At the end of each stage, the code should be tested, and you should estimate the number of resources (people and other costs) required for this stage. Depending on what stage of development you are at, this data can help you develop a financial plan for the firm and identify the appropriate investors to approach for raising capital.

Clearly described requirements

Before getting into the details of the project, it is important to have a clear picture of how it will turn out.

Creating a complete vision and list of product requirements is helpful for making a product development roadmap and strategy for the future and deciding which tasks should be done first and which ones can wait. It will spell out the steps that need to be taken for the project to be completed successfully.

Before starting the software production process, it is very important to create and go through with the entire team a thorough and concise roadmap that covers the entire software development project. If you have a clearly defined product vision and a sound plan for the coming months, you can choose the key performance indicators and metrics that will be used to monitor your success.

A great way to speed up the software development process is to make a minimum viable product (MVP) before you start working on the whole software product.

In software development, an MVP, or “minimum viable product,” is a version of a product that is simple but has enough parts to attract “early adopters” who will test the idea in the “real market” early on in the software development cycle.

Right team

The time it takes to finish a project depends on how complicated it is and how many dedicated developers are working on it. However, it should be noted that this is not direct proportionality.

Increasing the number of programmers in a team only sometimes leads to faster software development. It is possible to do more with a team of five experienced programmers than with eight young programmers. Even so, large teams will struggle to communicate and divide tasks without good management.

The ideal method, in our opinion, is to break down a large development project into more manageable subtasks. You can then delegate these achievable tasks to self-managed teams. When you use an agile development method that focuses on many small parts and the team structures that come from them, you end up with small teams that work well.

Production control

Quality assurance should be implemented at all stages of the software development process. The QA team, for example, must build scripts, generate test documentation, and more, which may surprise our customers who expected testing to start after development is complete.

If identifying and fixing issues takes up a portion of your team’s time, implementing new features can become increasingly difficult as the project progresses. Test automation can help prevent this situation from ever getting to the point where a human tester will never get to it by identifying major bugs early in the development process. This improvement will save you a significant amount of time and effort.

Automated testing of your product after it has been made is also time-consuming, so you should plan and do it from the start.

At Dashdes, we do many different kinds of testing, such as unit testing, integration testing, weighted regression testing, and performance testing.

Critical path to achieve the goal

The Critical Path Method (CPM) is a project management and process planning method that separates critical and non-critical processes to reduce schedule overruns and bottlenecks. CPM is ideal for projects with multiple interrelated processes.

The five steps listed below are often used in CPM programs.

1. Outline the activities to be performed and arrange them in a logical, chronological order.
2. Make a critical path diagram or flowchart to demonstrate how each step in the process is related to the others.
3. Find relevant links between activities and ignore irrelevant ones.
4. Determine when each task is expected to be completed and executed.
5. Look for or create backups or alternatives for the most important routes.

Conclusion

Developing new software involves a significant amount of time and work. Sometimes, large development projects that require the collaboration of a team of highly skilled programmers take longer to complete.

As a result, to keep the project within the agreed time frame, it is necessary to use measures that speed up the overall development.

Our team here at Dashdevs has achieved great results in a very short time. Feel free to contact us so we can tell you more about the opportunities!