If you had to list all the pain points facing your average development team, the budget would undoubtedly be right at the top.
Teams are constantly being tasked with “doing more with less,” even in situations where that may seem untenable. Optimizing your software development budget to achieve more cost-effective outcomes, all without sacrificing quality can be a challenge to be sure. But it’s not an impossible one, as the following practical strategies go a long way towards proving.
1. Making Better Use of Testing Environments
One of the best ways to maximize how far a software development budget will go – and likely even save critical funds as well – has to do with the adoption of ephemeral environments.
Ephemeral environments are essentially temporary environments that are used for the purposes of feature testing, quality control – you name it. They mimic a live production environment precisely, though any work completed in the ephemeral environment does not impact what anyone else is doing. It’s a great, fast way for team members to collaborate with one another and gather feedback, even if people are spread out halfway around the world at the time.
Of the many benefits that ephemeral environments offer, cost-effectiveness is chief among them. Not only are they very simple to set up, they’re just as easy to tear down when they’re no longer needed. Rather than creating more permanent environments every time, the same work can be done in a fraction of the time – allowing team members to gather the actionable information they need so that everyone can move on. No additional resources are needed, and team members are then free to focus their attention on more forward-thinking matters.
2. It’s Time to Embrace Agile Methodologies
Another great way to maximize your organization’s software development budget (not to mention its long-term investment in the team) is to move to Agile methodologies if you’re not already doing so.
Agile is a specific approach to project management that involves taking a project and breaking it down into a series of smaller and more manageable chunks. Rather than forcing one person to wait for someone else to be done with their work so that they can contribute, team members are allowed to work independently of one another through the planning, execution, and even evaluation phases.
The main way that this helps to maximize a software development budget involves achieving a far faster time to market. The sooner the project is completed, the sooner it can get into the hands of the end users and begin making money.
There are other opportunities to be found in the Agile methodology, too. Because of their precise nature and collaboration, Agile projects emphasize feedback early and often – leading to a far better end product. They allow more flexibility and better control over the development process, can lead to significantly improved project predictability, and can help reduce risks.
All these factors are often the source of unexpected delays or cost overruns in many software development projects, which collectively work contrary to your goal of maximizing the overall budget. All told it’s a software development methodology that has become increasingly popular in the last few years in particular. All it takes is one look at the benefits to see why.
3. The Era of Open Source
Finally, one practical strategy that you should absolutely consider to help maximize your software development budget involves leaning into the advantages of open-source solutions whenever possible.
The most obvious advantage to your budget that open source software offers are that these tools are available at a cost that is exceptionally lower than some of the “enterprise” tools you may be used to. Not only do you need to deal with the overhead costs that typically come along with the procurement process, but things like license renewals also don’t have to be managed over the long term either.
But that’s just the most immediate cost-related benefit. Open source software is high quality by design, and it is backed by countless people who are constantly reviewing it and improving it whenever possible. So not only can organizations save a lot of time by not needing to create code from scratch, but they can also enjoy community-related development during things like integration.
All this, and you get to enjoy a level of freedom and flexibility that you often don’t get from the larger alternatives. There is no limit on what you can do with open-source software or how it can be used in general. When you also consider that security also tends to be quite strong because of the aforementioned community involvement, it becomes clear why open source software is an avenue that you should absolutely pursue.
The Path to a Maximized Budget Begins Now
In the end, these are just a few of the ways that software development teams can “work smarter, not harder” – and hopefully save a bit of their budget at the exact same time. Remember that every organization differs from the next; understand that not every strategy will be right for every project. Sometimes it is possible to squeeze more out of the budget than you thought – in other scenarios, it will literally be impossible.
The key is to keep an open mind, adopt what works for you, and jettison what doesn’t. By trying to understand the nature of these strategies and what each brings to the table, your team and its project managers can make the most informed decisions possible given the context to maximize their software development investment as much as possible.