
How to choose the best tech stack for your software project?
There are a lot of questions you need to answer to make sure your software development project is a success. And a key one is how to choose the best tech stack for your software project. Because picking the right one can make or break your business endeavor.
The term “Tech stack” gets thrown around quite a lot in IT, but like most technical buzzwords, it’s sometimes not exactly clear what it means and why it matters. Two subjects which we will tackle in this article.
What is a tech stack?
Think of a tech stack like the ingredients from a cooking recipe. It includes the programming languages, frameworks, and tools that software developers use to build an app. It is referred to as a stack due to the languages and components (hardware and software) it requires, which are built on top of one another or depend on one another.
Tech stack structure
A tech stack is made up of two elements: front-end and back-end. The front-end or client-side is what you as a user see and interact with when you use an app. It’s the visual side – buttons, call-actions, fields that need to be filled, and so on. The list of technologies that are involved is quite long but some of the key ones are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The back-end or server-side, though not visible to us as users, ensures that all the elements that enable the software to answer our requests function smoothly. Server-side includes programming languages, servers, databases, APIs, and more. More specifically technologies like Java, Python, Ruby on Rails, or .Net, just to name a few.
How to choose the best tech stack for your software project
Define your project
Think about what you want your software product to do. Who is your audience and what type of device they would use to access it: tablet, mobile phone, laptop, etc. This matters when choosing which technologies you will incorporate.
If, as we’ve previously suggested you want to start with an MVP, go for the most popular platform your target audience uses so you can reach the biggest number of people and reduce software development costs further down the line. Python-Django or Node, js-React are quite popular for MVP development.
Scalability
We all want our software idea to succeed but a lot of the time the software itself isn’t ready for that type of growth. So, it’s critical to choose a scalable tech stack. Both vertically to be able to add new features and horizontally to allow you to handle the increase in volume on your platform.
For example, for the backend, you can choose something like AWS which allows you to control your costs and add servers as the need appears, rather than having to estimate upfront and spending a bigger chunk of your budget.
Costs
Whether it’s licensing, subscriptions, hosting, maintenance, or your developer salaries the choice you make can have a big impact on your company’s financial health. If you go for a mature technology you might need to spend a bit more. But you can rest assure that you won’t have too many challenges in terms of reliability. If you go open source the costs would be lower but it might not be as reliable or secure as you want.
Team
If you have an in-house team, try to select technologies that your people already have experience working with. Or at least go for tech that has a big community on websites such as stack overflow or GitHub. This way your software developers can find solutions to the challenges they are having.
Another option, if time is not a factor, is to train your people in using the new technologies. This usually comes with an upfront cost for the training platform or provider, but it is better than spending resources on recruiting new employees. Especially if the technology is very popular and demand is high. Not to mention that IT professionals put a premium on companies that spend time and money helping them develop or update their skills.
Another way to go if time is a limit and you lack a large enough pool of potential recruits is to outsource your project.
What’s next?
Whether you decide to use your resources or outsource, QTeam can help. We’ve consulted on software development projects and developed software for both small and large enterprises.
Moreover, we’ve worked with countless back-end and front-end technologies like Python, PHP, React, Selenium, Cucumber, Behat, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, AWS technology stack and more.
So, we’re ready to help you put your ideas into software.