As we know, a web development project is not infallible, and the pitfalls encountered regularly relate to planning and budget. A drifting production release schedule, a growing budget with requests, backtracking, and management changes.
These are certainly common situations, but which can be controlled by adopting several good “practices”.
Here are five tips to follow to limit these abuses and put the odds in your favor to ensure your project’s success.
1 / Prepare your project well
A well-prepared application development project is characterized by a good overview and a good detail in the execution.
To feed these two needs, which seem at two extremes of one another, the interlocutors can and must be different. This means that it is essential to identify the right people according to the project’s needs and request their presence only when necessary.
There is nothing worse than having people in a meeting who have nothing to do with it.
2 / An agile project
It is a word that I would gladly banish because it has been overused. Being agile does not mean quickly starting to develop the project by chaining sprints.
It means defining the project’s value ensures that it is delivered continuously through enhanced collaboration between stakeholders.
It is the definition of the value and the vision of the project that intervenes the most upstream. A project is very different from an idea, and it needs to be worked on before an application development phase can be initiated.
For this, it is necessary to invest upstream of the project, in particular through co-creation workshops. This investment of a few days will make it possible to remove the risks and ensure the project’s relevance. This phase is also essential in mobilizing the project stakeholders, ensuring the change management phase.
3 / Knowing when to take side roads
The resources available on the Internet are such that the difficulty is not to find an answer to a need but to choose.
And often, to avoid choosing or maintain tools that we have not developed ourselves, we prefer to re-invent the wheel. It is a real cultural pitfall in the technical teams, and we must fight against it.
The essence of your project must be identified, and it is on this that the budgets must be earmarked. How many are IT departments reluctant to use a SaaS solution that will cost them a few tens of euros per month and, conversely, prefer to re-invest tens of person-days to develop an undoubtedly inferior tool? The famous CAPEX vs. OPEX.
Conversely, we choose open source libraries lightly, simply because we do not have to go to the checkout, without taking the time to check if they are correctly maintained, if the code is understandable, and that we can contribute, if they are themselves up to date in terms of dependencies, if the number of open tickets is reasonable with tickets that have not remained open for five years, etc.
4 / Cultivate good communication
Whether the team in charge of the project is internal or external, listening and openness must be the norm in a balanced relationship.
Squeezing a team to meet a deadline can happen, but it doesn’t have to be the norm. If the communication is one-sided because one of the two parties cannot be opposed with a no, the project will sooner or later go to the wall.
You will quickly have people in front of you who will say yes by putting themselves in impossible situations to try to deliver (to the detriment of the quality and, therefore, the project’s future).
The technical teams should not be treated only as performers, but they must also understand that the issue itself is not technical.
5 / Ensure that a euro invested tomorrow will have at least the same impact as today
Projects have a lot in common with romantic relationships. In the beginning, the relationship is passionate, everything has to be built, and we only see the positive sides.
But if you don’t maintain that relationship, it wears out. For development projects, it’s quite similar: past the euphoria of the blank sheet, you have to either accept or remedy the flaws of the project.
This is normal, and it is not inevitable. If you want to continue building floors at home, you must constantly consolidate the basics and sometimes agree to remove or reassign rooms (you will notice that I changed my analogy to avoid a few wraths).
In concrete terms, you will often hear technical teams talking about “technical debt”. It must be represented in the form of wear. We mistakenly think that because the software is intangible, it does not wear out. It’s wrong. Like a car, if it is not maintained regularly, the cost of repairs at some point will become such that we will prefer to consider the purchase of a new vehicle.
However, replacing software is much more complex than replacing a car, for the simple reason that car specifications are broadly the same from car to car. All manufacturers adhere to it and deliver a vehicle with four wheels, an engine, and a flywheel.
As part of the software, a redesign will involve knowing precisely the target to be reached, and to do so, having a very good knowledge of the business need. Since many different developers can work on the project, the only source of truth is the code.
This usually involves having to reverse engineer the existing one to develop the new tool, which usually drives up costs.
To not get there, you have to take the time to deal with the wear and tear over time, not hesitate to remove parts of code if they are no longer useful. The “just in case” argument doesn’t hold; your code history management tool is here.
Finally, maintaining your dependencies over time also means avoiding tedious migrations when the time comes for a major version upgrade.
Would you like to start your online business presence? Are you looking for Web Development in Pakistan to help you boost the look of your website? You can contact us to provide you with affordable web design and development services.
The Impressive Blogs 