Developers often face a dilemma that makes them scratch their heads for answers.
Maintaining a balance between these sensitive parameters is nothing short of an art. Where you must pick up speed but cannot afford to make mistakes, you also don’t want to overspend the dedicated number of hours for the sake of ensuring quality.
It can get even more challenging when variables outside of a developer’s control are added to the equation. So, here’s a simple guide to help everyone navigate through the dilemma in software development.
The Cost-Quality-Time Triad of Software Development
Not only professionals but when companies hire software developers, they must also account for the Iron Triangle as it’s popularly called. There’s an interplay between the three components;
- Cost: Software engineering cost includes financial resources allocated to a project. It provides labor expenses, infrastructure costs, and third-party services. Managing these costs is essential as overruns on either end can lead to budget constraints and affect the two other elements of the triad.
- Quality: The word in the industry is that you cannot put a cost to quality. But that’s not entirely true. Quality is one word that encapsulates a software’s overall excellence, including its reliability, usability, and performance. Quality depends on the product’s ability to meet the end-user’s expectations and requirements.
- Time: Time is the third vital element in the triad and represents the project’s schedule, deadlines, deliverables, and milestones. Effective time management is pivotal to ensure the software you develop is delivered on time and while following the quality expectations.
These three elements are interconnected to the extent that changes in one can impact the other two. So, ensuring a balance between all three is akin to the game of Jenga, where one wrong move can bring the tower down.
Now the trick to creating a balance is ensuring you manage each element efficiently and use your understanding of this balance to hire software developers who also understand their interplay.
Managing Cost | The Financial Backbone of Triad
Software engineering costs include developer salaries, buying software licenses, hardware expenses, and third-party services. The costs associated with a project always have a baseline, but there’s also a controlled range to manage the fluctuations in the process.
However, the baseline can vary according to the project’s complexity and available resources, which, of course, can be difficult to estimate without an in-depth analysis of the software architecture and development requirements.
Always Work with a Set Budget: Create a budget after identifying all the potential costs and resources required. However, always keep a buffer to ensure you don’t run into budget allocation issues when needed.
Follow Resource Optimization Practices: Optimize resource utilization, like using open-source software reusable coding best practices, and leverage cloud computing to bring down costs.
Run a Cost-Benefit Analysis: It’s an ongoing exercise where you check if the investments made for the project are contributing as intended or not. If not, reallocate resources or change them as required.
Quality | Make it Your Best Friend
Quality represents your efforts to meet all the requirements and expectations set by the employers and stakeholders. Top-class software engineering companies have dedicated quality control experts to ensure every project fulfills its intended purpose. You know the project is a high-quality project when it functions without errors and provides a positive user experience.
Now, the important thing here is to set costs to ensure you do everything required to deliver a high-quality project. Here’s how to ensure quality;
Implement Effective Testing Measures: Use rigorous testing where you cover unit, integration, performance, security, and all the tests required.
Following Coding Best Practices: Follow industry best practices to write and review the frontend and backend code.
Build and Share Software Documentation: Detailed documentation of the software you are building now will help future designers and developers understand and maintain the code easily, as they won’t have to spend time figuring out everything.
When you prioritize quality, it can extend the timeline and a reasonable extension to ensure quality is acceptable.
Time | How Quickly It Runs Out?
Time is a precious commodity in any sort of software engineering project. Everyone wants to bring their product to the market as quickly as possible and achieve mass adoption. But in reducing time, if you compromise on quality, the money spent won’t bring any returns.
Hence, managing time is extremely important. You don’t want to spend a lot of time building a quality product that your competitor builds the same one in less time and gets the first-mover advantage.
Best Practices to Manage Time
Plan Projects Early On: Considering all the development variables, create a detailed project plan that includes the milestones, deliverables, and deadlines.
Use Agile Development Methodology: To build scalable software solutions follow agile development practices, as it makes adapting to the current needs easier. Using agile methodologies, you can also deliver an MVP faster enough to get initial feedback from your users and improve the product for better results.
Smart Resource Allocation: Software development is a resource-intensive activity and if not managed properly, overruns can arise in all these components we are talking about. Hence, it’s important to hire developers who can deliver what you need without causing delays.
Learn to Prioritize Your Work: Learn to prioritize your tasks according to their impact on the overall project. This means working on the essential features first and delivering them before other non-essential ones.
Helius has Cracked the Code to Balance Time, Cost, and Quality
Time, cost, and quality are interconnected when it comes to software development. This project management triad, when connected to software engineering, should be managed in a way to optimize all three.
To reduce the development time, you have to increase development speed, which means paying a higher price for the same work and getting more developers to work on a project, which makes this an inverse relationship. At the same time, spending less time on development will make it challenging to maintain quality as some steps are forced to be skipped to deliver the work on time.
At the same time, cost has a direct relation with time and quality. Higher quality and more time spent on a project will naturally cost more than the previous two scenarios.
Hence, in the real-world, you need to hire software developers or a company like Helius that knows how to make trade-offs between time, cost, and quality. By doing so, we can prioritize speed for quicker software release but also maintain quality standards and prevent budget overruns.
Get in touch with us to know how we can achieve the perfect relation between time, cost, and quality to deliver scalable software solutions.