Software development strategy for business

The article is a part of Code Inspiration’s software development outsourcing Knowledge Base.

Every project and business needs business strategy to expand and influence the market, locally or globally. Every project and business requires a marketing plan with robust campaigns, video and graphic content to attract new users and customers to make the turnover grow. To form your development strategy is as important as 2 other points mentioned above.

Why do I need this “development strategy”?

In this article to give you more than a “general” understanding of what is it and when do you need it, we will start with the definition of IT development strategy. Further will explain in more details when it is required. And finally, will proceed with a set of points describing pluses of formation of IT development strategy before the start of the development stage.

What is IT development strategy?

The main goal of the IT development strategy for your outsourcing project is to make a plan with a high-level development strategy where it will be defined the role, and the responsibility of all the participants, strategy list of tasks, communication protocol, managing methodology, division of the development into stages, controlling procedures over completion of each stage of development and testing as well as procedures of documenting activities.

Stages of IT development strategy

It goes without saying, that the bigger and the more complex your project is – the more documentation and information you will need before the start. The bigger your project is the longer time would be required to form your IT development strategy. In this paragraph let’s go through the most fundamental stages of IT development strategy.

Stage 1

Define project type

• Define type of your project. Timeline for beta and release version.

Stage 2

Select technological stack

• Select technological stack and development methodology for your IT project

Stage 3

Team composition

• Define team composition, the role of team participants and their responsibilities.
• Think about required team composition during the stage of active development.
• Further, after you finish the development stage most likely you will need only part of your team to proceed with software maintenance. Think about it in advance.

Stage 4

Communication

• Define communication protocols, and channels of communication. Nowadays, teams usually use Slack channels. Also, in many companies for video conferences team members use Zoom.

Stage 5

Long-term and short-term plans

• Spend some time to discuss the first stage of the development with your PM or BA in very details.
• Pay attention to long-term perspectives and plans. If things go according to your plan, it is always a good idea to proceed with the same team. So initially you should check if the team composition is suitable for your global plans.

Stage 6

Before the start of the development

• Discuss and document in details the process of development, terms of releases, testing stages, beta and release stages.
• Start development.

At first glance it might seem that these 6 stages could be done in 1-2 days, however, on practice it usually takes about month or two to do things properly. In the very beginning you might think  that formation of IT development strategy takes too much time, however, on your long development journey you will see how it will help you to save time, budget and what is more important nerves on your way to success release of the project.

The article is a part of Code Inspiration’s software development outsourcing Knowledge Base.