Just as any other process out there software development comes with a number of its own peculiar challenges, and in this article we are going to talk about some of the most common issues and ways to solve them.
The first misunderstandings between clients and developers can sometimes arise as early as the stage of gathering requirements. It’s not exactly uncommon for clients to not know for sure what they expect as the end result and change their requirements on regular basis. In this case it’s very important to have Agile software development solution that allows reacting to the new requirements.
Scheduling and estimation is another quite common issue among software developers, since due to such reasons as limited budget or lack of experience project managers sometimes cram too many tasks within too little man-hours. Bad scheduling can poorly affect such stages of the software development life cycle as development, testing and deployments. To manage tasks with more productivity and efficiency and to control the process better managers can use specialized task software that would allow creating, assigning and managing tasks and activities and set up deadlines, which will help to bring more discipline into the process both for managers and developing teams.
Development is arguably the most challenging stage, because that’s where all the previous miscalculations and misunderstandings start causing serious issues. And it’s often happens that once development has started clients decide to request for adding some “minor” features that on practice can seriously mess up the whole process because all the roles have been already assigned and everyone is busy with their part of the job. Unfortunately, such changes are practically inevitable since software development is the field that is highly responsive to the changes on the market. That’s why it’s important to be able to react to the competitors’ moves and add or remove some feature in the process of development. If you want to make these changes without having to stop the whole process and starting all over again it’s quite important to have flexible workflow management software that would allow editing already active workflows.
Once it’s time for testing stage we might once again face issues caused by bad scheduling. It’s the fact that there is no such thing as bug-free software development, which is why overly optimistic schedule is never a good thing – you simply won’t have enough time testing, fixing and re-testing, and these processes are absolutely crucial for successful software deployment.
Overall, most of the issues in software development can be either avoided or minimized with a healthy doze of careful planning, task management and communication, so make sure you don’t forget about these factors while launching your new project.