Are your development projects taking longer than anticipated? One of these five factors might be responsible.
In a fast-paced digital marketplace that produces new applications and services at breakneck speeds, slow and steady doesn’t win the race. As a business, you’re constantly thinking of ways to get your products to market as quickly as possible, but development is still a long, multi-step process with a lot of moving parts.
You’ve tried everything—from cobbling together different technologies to outsourcing—and you’re still looking at a huge project backlog. What’s keeping you and your team from picking up the pace? Here are the top factors slowing your developers down, and a solution that gets at the root of all of these problems.
Maintaining Legacy Code
If you’ve ever developed software, you already know the struggle of maintaining legacy code. Older systems or previous developers often leave behind code that’s no longer compatible with your current system, and there’s no quick way to work through it. Before diving into a new project, your developers have to find out how the existing system works, dissect the old code, and create new workarounds or rewrite the code entirely. By the time they finish this painfully time-consuming process, an important deadline has likely passed you by.
Constant Debugging
Buggy code could be another technical factor that’s slowing your development team down. Stopping development to fix a line of glitchy code might not seem like a big issue, but minor bugs can halt a project in its tracks. Developers can easily spend hours sitting through technical meetings or scrolling through Stack Overflow looking for solutions to buggy code. All of these hours eat into time that could be spent on building new software that delivers value to the business. What’s worse, once your developers have successfully debugged their way to a finished project, they’ll be right back at square one when they start the next one.
Negotiating Technology Decisions
Your company’s enterprise app development team is responsible for the entire app-building process from start to finish, which includes numerous process-related decisions. They must set up their back-end systems, pick what servers they’ll use, select a cloud provider, choose the languages they’ll code in, and more. Even though these decisions are standard issue and seldom vary from project to project, getting stuck in this assembly line keeps your team from jumping right into development.
Navigating Internal Communication
One of the hardest parts of the development process is bridging the gap between business and IT. The business team expects the IT team to bring their ideas to life, but it’s all too easy for a disconnect or miscommunication to result in a final product that fails to meet requirements. An open dialogue between IT and the business can prevent this from happening, but doing so requires a lot of translating between the two teams. Even if everyone feels like they’re in the loop and the development process moves along steadily, your developers will have to backtrack if the final product isn’t what business imagined.
An Inability to Share Progress
App development is a systematic process with a lot of steps but, oddly enough, sometimes the middle steps can get lost in the shuffle. Because there are so many steps in between the early stages of development and being able to view an actual product, there’s significant room for error in these intermediate stages. Developers often can’t share tangible work until the project is almost complete, meaning there’s not a lot of time or room for substantive feedback as the process moves along. Giving feedback at this point is challenging and causes extensive (and expensive) delays.
How Removing Code Enables Speed
These development bottlenecks all point back to one common problem — writing code in a silo. If you really want to speed up your development process, you need to eliminate code altogether and instill a more collaborative process.
No-code platforms like Unqork let expert and non-expert programmers alike develop enterprise-grade apps without writing a single line of code. Visual interfaces, versatile templates, and an intuitive self-service builder make it easier for users to build apps faster than ever—all without sacrificing the robust capabilities of traditional code.
Unqork creators are often highly experienced developers who use the platform to execute complex, critical tasks in a fraction of the time. With Unqork, your developers can sprint past speed bumps to get products to market faster. No-code eliminates legacy code, makes critical security and back-end decisions for you, and removes the need to debug with fully-functioning visual templates.
Perhaps most importantly, without code separating them, your business and IT teams are free to collaborate on ideas that truly move the business forward.
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