To ensure success in developing robust, quality and fit for purpose software solutions, it is important to follow a few simple practices, particularly when the development is shared between a number of software developers. If you set followable ground rules, your development process will run smoothly, if not you could end up throwing many years of development down the drain. We have identified 5 best practices that will help your software teams develop efficiently.
Many organizations think they know what they want their software to be capable of achieving, however in reality most don’t spend enough time thinking about and defining the details of how it should perform. For example, operator experience, ease of use, error trapping, user interface and database interaction are vital in creating software fit for purpose. Taking time to define each aspect of these in detail will ensure that the actual software development coding will be quicker and likely to be more bug free.
Once your organization has spent time on defining the software requirements, the next thing to consider is how the software is to be architected. Again this can be quite a time consuming process but is vital in ensuring the code is written in the correct way. The architecture should be fully documented and used as a software “Bible” for the project. Many organizations create a standard architecture for their software development process which can include all aspects of the stack and then invest in training their software engineers on the software tools used throughout the organization to achieve their software objectives.
Larger software projects require software teams to ensure that the project meets budgetary and time requirements. To this end, it makes sense to allocate blocks of code generation to individual developers or those working in small teams depending on the complexity of the task. By using the defined architecture, individual developers should be able to create code that is compatible with others. Some developers prefer to work on individual sections of code such as the user interface, while others may be more competent at low level stack development. Play to each developers strengths and allocate the work out accordingly.
When larger teams of developers are working on different aspects of the software design, it is critical that you manage revision control effectively. Quite often developers will modify a part of the software that is not documented, leading to a great deal of project delay and software rework. Using software repositories such as GitHub and Apache Subversion enables your developers to create tight revision control by having to check out and check in their software each time they modify it.
Finally, it comes to testing your software. This is the time when you get to see what your customers will see. Software testing is time consuming but essential in preventing software failures (bugs or unexpected features) when in the hands of your customers. In reality each developer will probably have tested their section of the code during their own development, but when brought together testing for software interoperability along with adherence to the original specification needs performing. Software testing is even more important if the software is used in products where failure would have a disastrous loss of life or huge financial impact such as aerospace in flight systems or network infrastructure systems. Test, test and test again is essential in these mission critical software circumstances.
