Speed up software development & reduce wasted time (+ examples) 

Why does software development take so long? 4 deciding factors 

1. Some projects are more complex than others

The more pages you have, the more features you need, the bigger the system gets. Let’s identify some types of complexity and determine which to cut down on to reduce development time.  

• Technical complexity: related to project design, software architecture, integration and use of modern technology 
• Requirement complexity: they are challenges in defining the project’s goals and objectives.  
• Structural complexity: refers to difficulty caused by structural mismatches with other tools or the company’s core system.   
• Deadline complexity: when the team skips steps to make the project meet the deadlines or when a project has a tight deadline with limited resources, the team becomes stressed and overworked, decreasing the code quality.  
• Accidental complexity: when inefficient coding practices and outdated methods are applied and unintendedly cause inconvenience.    

2. The tradeoff between code quality and meeting the deadline

Balancing between having high-quality code and finishing the project is like slacklining. You must be careful and not overprioritize a side. Many businesses were confident about taking technical debt to speed up the process, but these debts will turn around later, causing them to fix it in the long run. 

The case of Healthcare.gov in 2013 perfectly explains this.   

Prioritizing the deadline, they skipped documentation, didn’t double-check the code quality, and made poor architectural planning. This led to a crashed website that couldn’t handle the volume of traffic after launch.   

Afterward, the team spent months and an additional cost to hire more people to fix the problems  

3. The people itself: Communication, management & skillset

Individual skills, experience, and work ethics all influence the software development procedure.  

Also, the communication level between team members is an important matter. Ineffective communication can lead to delays and errors. While being transparent and following ethical standards will likely result in high-quality code with fewer errors and reduce development time spent on debugging and testing.   

FBI lost $170 million for a failed Virtual Case Files system. The project had poor communication that led to unclear requirements. At the same time, they frequently changed leaders without a clear plan, leaving executives confused and losing control of the project.

4. Scope creep

Software development is a long process, and changes can happen anytime. A market shift, a change in the stakeholder’s decision, a new demand from customers, all can lead to change. However, not all businesses have a plan to deal with changing requirements during the process, leaving the team caught off guard and delaying the project.   

A report from PMI in 2021 showed that despite having 55% of projects completed on time and 73% met the original scope, 34% of projects still suffering from scope creep. 

How to measure the development speed?

Some managers measure development progress by counting lines of code finished per sprint or day. And this method bugs me. It doesn’t account for the functioning code. You can write 1000 or 2000 lines a day, and your manager praises you, but in fact, none of them work and are full of bugs. 

Because of this, managers use a metric called development velocity. It determines the team’s performance based on the volume of delivered features within a given period. Development velocity also helps teams estimate the time to develop new functionality based on the previous sprints.  

But velocity also has its problems. If the team’s current velocity does not match previous sprints, unnecessary pressure will arise. When the team becomes obsessed with maintaining or improving velocity, they make trade-offs that might cause detrimental effects on the final quality.   

I recommend not using development velocity for a performance review and especially for comparing between teams. This number is great for evaluating your progress within the estimated timeframe and can be a decent planning sidekick. 

Stupid ways that won’t speed up development time

We know time is precious, and you try your best to reduce it. But not every effort is reciprocated with good results. Here’s some common mistakes that might unintentionally lengthen your development time. 

Adding more developers to the team

Having more team members on board does not mean your problem is solved. The existing members will have to train and spend time working with new hires to help them keep up with the project. 

Setting up an unattainable deadline

A tight deadline might get your system bug-laden. And the team might take more time fixing those bugs afterwards, technically slowing things down and trading off quality. 

Being overdependent on manual testing

As the development process goes on, the quality assurance team will have more tasks to do, and adding new features or changing the scope will be much more difficult. Your testers and developers would spend most of the time fixing bugs and finalizing the application.  

 The worst scenario is you trying to expand the quality assurance team with a new tester, which cycles back to the first problem we mentioned.  

Having unnecessary meetings

It doesn’t matter if you have a long meeting after every sprint or 5-minute daily catchup; the goal is to keep meetings straight to the point.  

At Synodus, one of our teams has a daily catchup that many think is unnecessary, but in fact, it works better than a 2-hour monthly meeting that ends up discussing irrelevant items.

The right tips to reduce software development time + retain quality

1. Focus on building a quality team not a quantity team

Here are 2 rabbit holes when assembling your “avenger”: 

• Having a big-quantity team does not mean you have more qualified developers in the house.  
• Avoid hiring freshers or juniors because they are obstacles. Having a team full of seniors is expensive (they cost more to hire) and can cause an imbalance in task management (no senior wants to do the easy tasks).  

The key is hiring a compact and balanced team, meaning you have senior and junior executives to join hands together. This is best to avoid chaos and frustration. Everybody has work to do and something to learn. Meanwhile, you optimize your budget and ensure code quality.  

Usually, a small team of 3 to 7 people is the best choice, as there is less confusion, and team members can communicate and work better. For larger projects, you can split into smaller individual teams, each solely focusing on a specific part. 

2. Are you using sprint or marathon mindset?

In project management, there are 2 key mindsets: sprint and marathon.  

	Sprint	Marathon
What to do	Developers work hard to deliver products faster, maybe before the deadlines	Developers take time and caution to work on a project
Pros	It’s good when the team needs to get work done quickly and hit the market faster	By having more time, developers can ensure code quality, good performance and minimal errors
Cons	Can lead to lower-quality products and more bugs	It is not favored by startups. Plus, longer also means more money spent on developers
Method	Scrum, Agile	Lean, DevOps

And then we have something in-between, perfectly balancing quality and time constraint. Intervals combine the best traits of both mindsets to get a quality product in the fastest time. Here’s an example of how it works: 

• First 2 months, you team sprint through the planning process, focusing solely on designing and coding the foundation.  
• Next 4 months, you team slow down, take some time and marathon through developing and testing the primary function. 
• Afterwards, you have another sprint to finalize the application.  

3. Save time by testing along with development

Testing at the end can risk detecting blunders at a later stage, costing more of the budget and increasing time-to-market.   

It’s best to perform testing along with the process. This will reduce development time and speed up the quality assessing process. A way to do this is by applying automation testing tools that will identify bugs without manual intervention. Most automated testing tools can do simple ones such as unit tests, integration tests and functional tests. With more time being saved, you can build new features.   

4. It’s 21^st century, use automation

How to develop software faster? Automation can be your answer. Instead of spending time on tedious coding, automating tasks will cut it, allowing you to focus on intricate work while minimizing the risk of errors and holdups.   

Automation works best in these areas:  

• Automated testing: You can use Katalon, Appium, Cypress, or Ranorex Studio  
• Automated coding: These tools can generate boilerplate code or set up basic functionalities based on predefined templates. You can use Visual Studio Code for examples. 
• Automated deployment: Most of these tools leverage the idea of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (which we’ll explain later) to facilitate a seamless and reliable pipeline. One prime example is Jenkins and Docker.  
• Other workflow automation tools: Despite not directly helping the coding process, the tools can be decent for project management. You can set up a request-approval process, a project tracking between cross-functional teams and many more. Some reliable workflow automation tools are Kissflow, ClickUp, Zapier, Pipefy, etc. 

5. Outsourced your development team

Another way to reduce your development time is outsourcing – leaving the work in the hands of qualified developers.  

I’m not saying that the outsourcing team is better than your in-house team, but they do have (1) a variety of tools that can speed up the development process and (2) many developers with different domains and levels that you can pick.  

The two things alone can help you boost the overall speed. And even if you’ve already had an in-house team, why not double the force for faster speed and better quality? Let them handle the tedious work while your team focuses on demanding and core functions.

Let me prove it to you!   

Using low-code with a sprint mindset, we have built a task management system for 2000 users under 10 weeks with a team of 4. This could have been a 1-year project without the help of the right technology.  

Seamlessly working with the in-house team, we modernized a legacy system while they were focusing on the freshly built IoT system.  The overall development time was reduced by 20% by integrating 2 teams together.  

Many startups also partner with outsource teams in the early stage to quickly
build an MVP, release faster, and validate the market. This allows them to focus on finding investors, finding the right in-house team, and still getting their product moving. 

This is just one of a few techniques we use at Synodus to reduce development time and increase productivity. Other than that, dedicated project management, strong software architecture and detailed planning are the daily exercise to burn the fat. 

With over 250+ qualified developers, here’s what we can do together: 

• Custom software development (from web, mobile app, cloud to on-premises applications) 
• Low-code development to optimize your budget and save times (using Microsoft and Salesforce)  
• Adopting emerging technologies for your software, including Blockchain, AI, IoT and data analytics. 
• Rapid MVP development. 

6. Opt for -aaS, low-code and IDE

If you want to build a simple application quickly, using -aaS tool can be a much better choice than custom development. They are easy and quick to maintain and set up. For example:   

• AWS RDS managed service is good for setting up a database.  
• Use Shopify if you want to build a simple eCommerce store.   

But if these above tools are limited in customization, you can leverage low-code technology (platforms such as Microsoft Power, Salesforce Lightning, Mendix, or Outsystem).  

They are a combination of pre-build code blocks and traditional coding, where amateur and professional coders can take part in coding together. Like a recipe book, low-code gives you the ingredients and guide to make a simple dish. If you want to make it special, you can add your secret taste and condiment.  

At the same time, leveraging an Integrated development environment, or IDE can also enhance your productivity in coding complex programs. The tools include a code editor, a code compiler, a debugger, and automation tools that give you coding suggestions. IDEs allow developers to find their coding mistakes in real-time before they are beyond the fixing point. 

7. Consider continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)

If all these above tips instantly speed up software development, CI/CD leans more on long-term benefits. Meaning that it won’t show you the result immediately but will reduce the software development cycle time in the long run.   

By constantly building, upgrading, delivering, and deploying, your software is kept up to date and high functioning:   

• Continuous Integration (CI) is where a developer constantly integrates new code into a shared repository. An automatic build verifies and detects bugs during each check-in without interrupting the application. From there, the code is cleansed, optimized, and ready to be run.  
• Meanwhile, Continous Delivery/ Deployment (CD) automatically deploys your code once it passes the CI stage. However, you can also set up to make the manual decision to deploy, allowing you to have more control over what to use.   

Using CI/CD encourages developers to be creative in a responsive environment while improving the overall speed. 

8. Minimize technical debt

Technical debt happens when a team deliberately chooses to accelerate the software development process without realizing that the speed will later require amendments. If done strategically, technical debt might not be a negative issue.  

However, without proper management, it can result in system complexity and significant issues. Shortcuts might save time now, but more problems will appear in the long run. 

To minimize technical debt, you should take the following actions: 

• Always solve the technical debt before choosing to work on other solutions; 
• Apply the pair programming and code review techniques; 
• Fix bugs, duplicate code, low-quality code, and code smells; 
• Implement test-driven development (TDD). 

Wrapping up

Reducing development time is not an easy task. To successfully speed up development, your team should have the right mindset, prioritize quality, test gradually during development, integrate necessary tools, and avoid technical debt. Speeding up software development does not necessarily mean getting rid of quality, so prepare well before you settle down the process.  

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