As an IT-industry evolves, the software product development process becomes more sophisticated. The market demands more quality, more cost-effective solutions, and the industry responds with software product development lifecycle improvements.
Let’s discover 3 ways to enhance your software development and figure out how to select the best-outsourced software product development services for you.
1. Get Your Dev Lifecycle Under Control: 3 Software Product Development Phases To Keep In Mind
When developing software product solutions, writing code isn’t usually the only aspect you and your coworkers should care about. The days when coding itself was enough to stay competitive are long gone. Things are different now.
Let’s discover the crucial software product development life cycle phases and find out why they are essential to your success.
Idea Validation Stage: Prove Your Concept
First things first, you have to validate your software product idea to understand whether your concept is relevant or not. This is why agile startups often use Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in their early development phase.
In a nutshell, the Minimum Viable Product is your application prototype. The whole idea is to minimize the feature set while keeping the core functionality in the first version. This brings the following benefits to your software product development:
- Early launch. You significantly reduce your time to market by trimming the complementary functionality of your software product;
- Initial costs reduction. As you build a minimum version of an app, the expenses go down substantially;
- Proof of concept. Regardless of limited functionality, MVP validates or rejects your software product development concept, so you get the vital knowledge for future moves.
Architecture Designing: Build Your Product Wireframe
As soon as you’ve discovered demand for your software concept, get down to planning your product architecture. Based on community feedback about your app prototype, determine the most and least favorite sides of the software. This way, you can create a plan for your development process.
Do not skip the architecture designing phase under any circumstances. Instead, consider this phase as your investment in the convenience of your future development. Just because the objective seems intuitive and trivial doesn’t mean it actually is. Developers tend to gain too much faith in themselves and move right to coding. Unfortunately, it almost always ends up poorly.
Read our tips on product design development
Product Engineering: Let’s Write Some Quality Code
Now, the keyword is quality, not code. With that said, this software product development lifecycle stage is just as crucial as the others.
If you’ve done a great job designing your product architecture, you now can select suitable technologies to achieve the planned results. This includes choosing between relational and non-relational DB, front-end and back-end technologies, along styling decisions.
Spend some time exploring your options. As soon as you start your software product development, changing your tech stack will get more and more expensive in both time and money matters.
2. Balance Your Budget: Build a Flexible Strategy
Being a professional software product development company doesn’t mean dividing your budget into equal parts for each dev cycle phase. The modern agile-driven IT-market requires developers to stay flexible and be ready to pivot.
You should keep your budget dynamic. This means always keeping in mind the possibility to change the development focus radically. Here are the steps to staying agile:
- Limit functionality development expenses. Here at Gravum, we understand that there are always some features to create. Make sure not to overdo the feature set investment and keep the budget available to new opportunities;
- Do not rely too much on the additional and complementary features. Discover the most demanded functionality and do not invest in the secondary ones;
- Always keep some emergency budget. No matter how well your things are going, the situation may change. Ensure your safety by keeping resources in reserve.
3. Do Not Skimp On The Marketing
This may sound surprising, but some software development companies see no necessity of marketing investment whatsoever. They believe that the product itself is the ultimate marketing tool capable of handling all the aspects of getting profitable positions in the market segment.
Now, hear us out: an outstanding software product performs a substantial part of the marketing activity just by being relevant and in-demand amongst the community. Nevertheless, you should take care of the initial market presence establishment for the product to begin its the word spreading.
How To Select The Best Software Product Development Services
Our outsourcing experts at Gravum believe that there is no universal set of rules for picking the software product development provider. However, we understand that there are several aspects to look for:
- Past experience in your industry. Service suppliers with a knowledge of your business specifics tend to perform more efficiently than the ones that don’t;
- Motivation fuelled for success. You can always distinguish the highly motivated contractors from the others. These will bring you the results you are looking for.
The Bottom Line
Software product development is a complex task nowadays. Planning is everything these days, so stay prepared for challenges and unexpected market pivots. If you seek quality software product development services, reach out to our Gravum development team. Our dedicated professionals strive for excellence to provide the best software product development you can get on the market.