PsiberTech Solutions: Cutting Cost in Custom Software

Welcome to the custom software cost cutting series part 2, If you have not read the previous post please click here and read that first. That might provide you a clear understanding and you would be able to appreciate the continuity of this post. Now let us begin with today’s topic – The Flash Effect.

Custom Software Projects usually begin when the management feels it is necessary to invest in a software that might:

a) Increase productivity or
b) solve an existing problem.

However, the actual necessity of this project to the end user might have originated several months before this. Thus, there would be huge pressure in developing and implementing this software within a short time, aka Flash through it. If only I had a dollar for every time the customer said, "we wanted this yesterday”. Looks like a familiar scenario? Now let’s look at the implications of this.

Time is Money and someone is going to pay for this loss of time or rather shortage of time to develop the application. The management would essentially put pressure on the vendor to deliver the software in a short deadline, which is usually not realistic. The vendor who would now need more than the intended resources to complete the project, would quote based on the necessity.

Let us look at the chart for fast, cheap and good we had seen yesterday here. Desperate customers, who want the project to go live in very short time increase the budget as much as 50% as the vendor needs to spend twice the amount of resources to code and test within that time.

Solution:

Have realistic deadline when it comes to custom software development. A qualified vendor is going to work with you to understand your requirements, document them, make prototypes, accept confirmations, develop the actual system, do internal testing then help you to do user acceptance testing, then make amendments before going live. This is very organic process, and even with agile methodology and sprints this is going to take a decent amount of time, which would vary as per your size of the project.

It is much faster to provide enough time to develop and properly test, rather than go live and fix innumerable bugs one after another due to poor testing. This very true because the vendor might not have enough time to finish coding your project and ultimately would cut off time in testing process to deliver on time.

That is all for today, and I am glad you took another step towards cutting down cost of your next custom software development project. Thanks for stopping by and be sure to come back for another interesting tip on the same topic. Alternatively, you can look here and here for other articles on custom software development cost.

Thanks for dropping by and have a fantastic day!