
The best ways to reduce costs in your custom software development project
In the past, we’ve written about the benefits of developing your bespoke software solution and in this article, we want to share some tips on how to reduce costs in your custom software development project or keep them as low as possible.
Keeping expenses down or reducing them is important no matter what size your organization is. Whether you’re a plucky start-up getting ready to take on the big guys or an established global company, having a healthy budget is among the top priorities. And this is especially true when you are trying to build a software solution from scratch.
So, check out QTeam’s advice on keeping your costs in check.
Plan
Planning helps you save money. The better you are at correctly identifying what you want from your software and how you want to achieve this, the less time and money will be spent on developing it.
Furthermore, after you develop a coherent business plan make sure you go through a discovery session with your software development partner. This helps you identify any challenges, refine your plan, get an estimate about costs and time as well making sure that everybody understands the scope of the project.
If you are a start-up, a business plan will give you something to base your custom software development project on and you can always come back to it to make sure you’re on the right track. HubSpot has a great article you can check out highlighting some cool business plan templates.
Outsource
You don’t need to have hundreds or thousands of employees to outsource your software development needs. According to Clutch, more than one-third of small businesses (37%) currently outsource a business process, and more than half (52%) plan to do it.
Outsourcing not only allows you to significantly cut down on overhead costs such as salaries, taxes, office benefits, workspace, software, and so on, but it also allows you to focus on your core business. And all this without having to sacrifice quality.
Adopt agile
Agile is a software development methodology that helps you reduce time to market and decrease costs. In short, it consists of dividing the software development process into short-term iterations of around 2 to 4 weeks. After each stage, the client and software development team meet to see the outcome of the last iteration.
This approach is highly flexible allowing you to make quick changes depending on market conditions or business requirements without having to overhaul the entire software solution. Moreover, you also have a better overview of each functionality, what it does and any risks associated with it.
Start with an MVP
An MVP or Minimum Viable Product allows you to quickly test your software idea and see how it works. An MVP has a basic set of functions, but enough to get the ball rolling and start getting customer feedback as well as being able to showcase it to any possible investors. And an MVP approach helps you reduce costs in your custom software development project as it is cheaper to build and gives you a better idea about what you need to do to make the product work.
Testing
In software development and custom software development specifically, there is no such thing as too much testing. The earlier in the software development lifecycle you spot errors and bugs the cheaper and easier they are to fix. So, make sure you start doing software testing on your solution early on in the cycle by ensuring that your software development team or provider includes QA specialists right from the start.
Our expertise
QTeam has been helping companies develop, improve and test their software development solutions for more than 5 years with great results and we can do the same for you.
Whatever your idea is, we can help you turn it into software.