Managing a software development project can give you a hard time if proper planning is not done. A number of software projects fail due to various reasons like incompetency to meet deadlines, going over the budget, not fulfilling customer requirements etc. However, there are few points that you can consider to follow to ensure that your software development project is not a failure. Let’s take a look at the points in detail –
Software Development is More than Simple Coding – A software development project’s productivity to a large extent depends on the choice of software language. The impact of using one language compared to other may make marked differences in the end software. However, if the capabilities of the team are strong, choice of language rarely makes a difference. Another thing that needs to be considered is that requirements gathering, analysis, design, configuration management, documentation, system & integration testing comprise around 70% of the total efforts on a project. Hence, coding is not the major task in a software development project as there are many other tasks that require equal focus.
Software Development is Not Same as Manufacturing – Normally, in a manufacturing facility, for increasing production, one goes for adding another assembly line or increasing the number of workers. The same concept does not work for software development too. It would be a wrong approach followed by a software development company in India or abroad if it considers adding more resources to attain the project deadlines. Adding more members in the team would degrade the work quality besides increasing the cost too. More importantly, there would be wastage of time in establishing sync between the old & new members.
Cost & Schedule Cannot be Interchanged – Schedule and cost of a software development project share a non-linear relationship. Shortening a pre-set schedule to meet a deadline will lead to inefficient team operation, increased communication complexity, reduced testing and to be more worse, lowered software quality. One of the most common causes of project failure is unrealistic schedules. So, try avoiding falling to any of such conditions.
These are some of the points that one should consider while working on software development projects.