Engineering Insights

Bringing in an agency to help build your software platform is a winning strategy - it saves you time, and stress and most importantly keeps you within budget. But businesses often find themselves at a crossroads when it comes to outsourcing solutions. Two popular options—Staff Augmentation and Project-Based Consultancy—offer distinct advantages and cater to different needs. Let's delve into the intricacies of each approach and explore the benefits they bring to the table. Sta

In the dynamic realm of software development, where agility and innovation are paramount, fostering an environment that encourages debates is not just beneficial—it's indispensable. The idea of debating within a software project may seem counterintuitive to some, as the conventional image of software development often revolves around quiet coding sessions and collaborative problem-solving. However, embracing debates in the development process can lead to a plethora of advanta

Remote teams spread out over multiple locations around the globe and speaking multiple different languages as their first are the norm these days for most software companies. This is a great trend, as it opens up the availability of software talent to software projects and makes hiring great software developers a much easier task for companies. But as with anything else in this world, those great things come with some downsides. One of the biggest downside is the lack of inte

Remote software teams is way forward in software development. No longer are companies tied to particular locations, waiting for resources and skills to be available and delaying the entire software process. By finding the right software resource at the right time and forming a remote team to work with any onsite team completely changes the game - and companies that are realizing this are getting ahead in the game. This is just one more evolutionary step in our ever changing i

1. Finding the right people for your team This is without doubt the hardest challenge. Finding skilled software professionals is hard, but find the people who work can work together is even harder. Although this is the hardest there is no way around it. The success of any software project depends on one factor - how good the team behind it is. We know this from our experience in working with 100s of software projects over the past 18 years, but research and data in this area

A recent post about making software project plans that work started a thread of conversation with a fellow software guy about how true it is that software projects are prone to fail and we should just accept that fact and plan around that. His point was that we should actually take a more positive attitude that software projects work out at the end and work from that positive space managing the risks. He does have a point, any work starting out with a negative thought actuall

Do you have any questions for your software vendor? You should. The standard stuff like what is the size of the vendor’s team, what are their skills, how long have they been around are usually available easily at the vendor’s website, their brochure or they are more than will to just give you that information. What is more difficult to know yet vitally important for you are the answers to the not so easy questions. Here’s our list of top 10 questions that must be asked before

Making a project plan for software development is one thing, but making it work is another. You've probably seen lots of software project plans in your day. They all look the same with their pretty Gantt charts and lovely blue annotations, don't they? Yet, do you know the failure rate of these pretty Gantt charts? The Standish Group's long-running CHAOS studies have repeatedly found that most IT projects miss their time, budget or scope targets. This humongous failure number

Bugs are a fact of life in software. There will always be bugs, we just need to find a streamlined way of catching them, reporting them,...

Do you find that your software development company is taking too long to deliver a project? Do they lack creativity and innovation? Would you like a partner who can provide accountability and transparency in their work? If so, read on. As a custom software development company that have worked with hundreds of clients all over the world we have come across all kinds of situations where multiple parties are involved in creating a software platform. The performance of each party

Bugs are the reality of software. We hate them, we do everything we can to get rid of them but they are always there and we have to learn to live with them - that is we have to manage the bugs and fix them in a sane way. This is important. Actually trillion dollar important. in study done by the Austrian software testing firm Tricentis, software failures cost the worldwide economy over $1 trillion annually! The same report also found that software failures have caused more th

Software developers have a reputations for being “difficult”. But from my years of working with literally hundreds of developers I know that what is considered “difficult” is just a wrong way of looking at things. You can completely change the interaction and behavior of a “difficult” developer if you just adopt a few easy changes in your thinking and action. These “software people skills” are super easy and it’s really painful to see how many project managers or team leads d

Software team leads have a difficult job. On one side they are expected to be the top developer in the team, cracking every technical challenge that comes their way with the snap of a finger yet on the other side they are expected to be the “manager” of the technical team. Now this “manager” bit is the one that is always fuzzy - it ends up meaning a lot of different things to different people and the team lead also ends up trying to fill all those roles that is expected of he

As a custom software development company a common question we get asked is about reducing the cost of development. Software development is expensive. Even using relatively lower cost countries such as Bangladesh or Cambodia, a startup owner is likely to spend the largest portions of her funds on making the software. Yet software is only a piece of the story and usually the one of the first ones, huge costs waits for her in marketing and sales that she has to budget for. Hence

Fact of life: More often than not a software team will have more work than they can juggle. What can a team lead do to get things done in...

Flat hierarchy It's important for the team to feel that they are not bogged down with management. We try to build this into the system by having very flat hierarchy in the teams. Usually a team a has a team lead and everyone reports to her. The team lead can decide pretty much everything as much as day to day operations of the team is concerned. This empowering of the teams help increase both our ingredients. Empowered teams feel more gelled because they feel their actions na

When you start developing a software product, you need an idea of what you want each component of the software to do. From the part 1 in this series on defining products 3 Questions to define a software product, you now know the essential questions you need to ask to define your product. Today I’ll be doing part 2 that goes over how you document the requirements. Knowing why, what and how your software product will be isn’t the end of the line for the product managers. You ne

Imagine you are in charge of creating a clear specification for a new software product. On one side you have your customer - a a high energy, super smart non-techie who flies off in tangents in every discussion yet has the most amazing business idea that needs a web and mobile app. On your other side you have software developers who want a precise software definition that goes over the nitty gritty of what the software needs to do. What do you do? Let me go over how we do thi

After our first two articles ( Software without anger: managing the development team and Software without anger: managing vendor relationship ) in this series of anger management in software projects we got a lot of feedback asking us about how to manage anger on a personal level. What can we, as software professionals, do to reduce anger in software project? Be it within the team, with stakeholders and even with ourselves ( this last one becomes obvious when you think about

Isn’t that a great title for an article about software development? If you’ve ever been involved in a software development project this would ring bells! This was the starting in the first article on this series - Software without anger: managing vendor relationship which goes over the distilled wisdom of 15 years or so that we’ve been around in this business of making software for our customers. That was all about how to manage the relationship with the software team that’s