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When taking on a new software development project, there are numerous factors that we immediately/automatically consider: technology requirements, front-end and back-end team requirements, project management, sprint planning, the need for alignment between design and development, etc.
However, there are other essential elements of the development process that businesses and organizations often fail to consider when starting a project, or initially don’t deem as important enough to focus heavily on, which incur costs that often don’t get accounted for initially and can pose significant risks to the long-term success of the project when overlooked.
In this article, we’ll explore these frequently overlooked but nevertheless key considerations, how missing them impacts projects, and what efficient approaches you can take to minimize them as much as possible.
1. Estimates
Estimates are a key element of the strategy phase of a development project. They help determine the people, time and budget needed for successful completion of the project. Done properly, they are essential in sprint organization and ensuring deadlines are met without majorly disruptive changes.
2. Refactoring
Even with meticulous planning, it’s often not possible to account for every potential challenge upfront and avoid refactoring completely. Scope changes and/or pivots can take place as a result of early user feedback (e.g. through testing an MVP), shifting market trends, or upgrades to technologies used while the development is still ongoing (this last one is most likely in longer, multi-year projects).
3. Testing
Making sure that what you have developed functions as intended is just as important as actually developing it. In addition to testing for security, you also need to test performance and functionality, or the resulting user experience as a whole, including accessibility and privacy.
Proper implementation of testing requires upfront consideration and investment, otherwise it’s likely to take longer and risks not being as thorough as a later tack on. AI can be a very helpful tool in testing and debugging, but should be used in tandem with manual developer testing to be as foolproof as possible.
It’s advisable to make testing a key part of the entire development process by adopting test-driven development, which ensures that you ongoingly test functionality as development progresses – even after a successful launch.
Without proper upfront and ongoing testing, risks of downtime are greatly increased, impacting revenue as your customers can’t access your products or services during that time. Done right, effective testing therefore directly translates into business value.
4. Maintenance
Post-launch testing is just one factor in another key step of the development process, which also often gets overlooked initially and causes risks such as downtime and performance issues to accumulate – ongoing maintenance.
In addition to adding proper testing, maintenance also includes improving existing functionality, fixing any temporary hacks, building admin tools, documenting everything, and properly setting up analytics to have a better overview of performance and any potential ongoing issues. All of these contribute to ensuring the website/application is able to scale with time and market changes.
5. Hiring & onboarding
The success of a development project ultimately depends on the expertise of the developers working on it. With constant shifts and innovations in software development, chances are you won’t have the right skills in-house for every single project you’d like to take on.
Fulfilling the development team’s needs will thus require an investment into hiring new in-house developers with the right skill sets or onboarding existing developers to fulfil the new technology needs.
In fact, in a lot of cases, both will be necessary to do simultaneously, while things can get complicated further when there are a lot of different technologies involved and you also need to take the time to onboard new developers so that they’re able to integrate their expertise in the required new technologies with your existing tech stack.
6. Employee overhead
Besides hiring and onboarding, and the obvious costs of employee paychecks, there are additional employee overhead costs that need to be considered, a lot of them associated with fostering a supportive company culture with a positive employee experience.
These include proper (and regularly updated) equipment and office perks, team buildings, internal events such as team talks, learning and upskilling opportunities, and any other activities and initiatives that promote employee happiness and help foster productivity.
7. The unexpected
After considering each of the hidden costs of development, there’s just one thing left to account for: the unpredictable things that are (nearly) impossible to consider upfront. These include employee sick and parental leaves, geopolitical events that contribute to significant marketing shifts, software licensing changes, blackouts and unexpected downtime, etc.
While impossible to predict, the impact of the unexpected can be greatly minimized with several approaches that efficient development teams already embrace. Some of the best precuations for these unexpected scenarios are:
- A future ready tech stack and development team
- An agile approach to development that embraces change and flexibility
- Having good backups and documentation
- Using open source software
- Providing good learning opportunities and resources
How a partnership with a development company can minimize these costs
Since a lot of these hidden development costs are associated with in-house employees, partnering with a specialized development company can greatly reduce most of those costs. The benefits increase with a dedicated long-term partnership, since you don’t have to find and vet new potential partner companies for each individual project.
In addition to eliminating all in-house employee overhead and the vast majority of those associated with hiring and onboarding, a dedicated development partner also provides unmatched resilience to the unexpected challenges that may arise. The ability to have custom team structures for each project and to swap out developers in case of unplanned leaves brings additional flexibility and safeguard to an already agile development process.
Another important benefit comes from the development partner’s proven success record which ensures an adherence to industry best practices such as proper testing and maintenance. Their experience across various projects and sectors also helps with more accurate estimates and uncovering potential issues quickly, resulting in less refactoring and fewer quick fixes.
Conclusion
Development projects are often complex, with a lot of different elements that are all vital to the project’s ultimate success and can incur significant unexpected costs if not properly considered. A partnership with a specialized development company is a quick, smooth and cost effective approach to minimizing these hidden costs of development that leads to long-term success.
