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Top 9 Software Development Methodologies For Your Business Requirements

Posted on by Akash Guha

Top 9 Software Development Methodologies

Following a proper software development structure can be highly valuable for your company. Instead of only development and launching, effective planning speeds up the process emphasizes core business requirements and helps manage a productive workflow. 

Likewise, eliminating potential bugs and wasting efforts also can be possible with a proper software development company in usa. So, let’s condense our thoughts on learning the 9 best software development methodologies.  

Lean Development Methodology

The lean development methodology is among the most popular software development methodologies. With this framework, the software manager aims to elevate a flawless development framework removing any counter-productive possibilities. 

Developed in the mid-twenty century, lean development originated by the Toyota Foundation to enhance manufacturing efficiency. After gaining more popularity in the last twenty decades, software engineers adopted this framework in 2003. 

To curate this methodology, ask your software developers to enlist activities that can hamper the software development process. After identifying time-wasting activities, you can eliminate or automate those tasks to improve the core-development process. Communication is one of the pillars of this software development system, which must be managed carefully and efficiently. 

Prototype Methodology

Prototype software development methodology follows feedback and a testing-focused development system. In this development framework, developers streamline the development process to build a prototype version of full-fledged software. 

After developing a prototype software, developers allow a limited number of users and testers to go through the software. Then, based on user and tester feedback, developers evaluate the development process and make software. 

Through this process, developers can sense a ton of possibilities based on user feedback. As this process is made to find potential bugs, developers can also ensure software’s flawlessness during mass usage. Through prototype development and a successful testing phase, developers can start working on the final product with zero bugs. 

DevOps Methodology

In contrast to any traditional software development methodology, the DevOps software development framework is designed to deliver software with high velocity and much-efficiency. This process combines effective tools and practices to facilitate software development, as both the development and the operational teamwork simultaneously function all the activities of a software life-cycle. 

The main motto of this development process is the simultaneous performance of the development and operational team. Working together and formally, the DevOps system allows businesses to provide constant innovation and improvement, providing a better final product. 

DevOps software development supports all kinds of businesses; the only demand is cultural change. Your business should follow the DevOps system after implementing new-age business development and organizing culture. 

Waterfall Methodology

The waterfall software development process is among the oldest and simplest forms of software development. Like a waterfall, this software development system only follows simplicity and easiness throughout the process, making it understandable for people. 

Likewise, a water stream never goes upward; the waterfall framework divides a software curation process with a step-by-step approach. Development and operation workers must ensure the proper flow; after completing one full step, they can go into the next one.  For timeline-heavy phases, visualizing scope with a Gantt chart helps map milestones, owners, and dependencies; teams can create gantt chart easily with Canva to coordinate sprints or stage-gates without losing sight of critical paths.

For amateur developers and businesses, the waterfall software development system is approachable. This system isn’t as flexible as the other ones, so if your software requires frequent plan-changing, this system isn’t for you.  

Feature-driven Methodology

Popular in large business farms, the feature-driven methodology focuses on the feature-centric development of software. It facilitates building softwares in simple and short iterations, which leads to a timely finish. For large business software or heavy software projects, a feature-driven software development process provides great usability and velocity. 

Invented in 1999, this software development process is highly customer focused. Firstly, clients inspect every feature; then, developers push it to the building code. This software development process follows a flexible approach and releases continuous features and improvements. 

Spiral Methodology

A balanced combination of an iterative and waterfall software development framework, spiral software development is one of the most effective software development plans available. Especially preferable for large, heavy and expensive development projects, the spiral development framework initiates early risk management to remove all the counter-productivity from the development phase. 

Similarly, developers explore and streamline development step-by-step. The main advantage of this process is risk management. A heavy risk management procedure highly helps developers in many ways. 

Extreme Programming Methodology

Extreme programming methodology, or XP methodology, is made for software development in a highly-unstable environment. Likewise, this system also supports cost-effectiveness and extreme flexibility. 

Through this process, software developers are also able to achieve time-effectiveness, as the XP framework is final product dependent. 

Rapid Application Development Methodology

With user participation, time-effectiveness and high efficiency, the rapid action development process has the best of every other development framework. Proper planning and risk management are also a plus of RAD; this is one of the old software development strategies. 

James Martin invented this software development process while working with IBM. Highly flexible with feature-driven and timely delivery, RAD is considerably the most used software development form. 

Read Also: A 5-Step Guide To Successful Software Development Outsourcing

Scrum Development Methodology

Scrum software development is for highly-emerging fields, and fields require flexibility. With cutting-edge development technology, high velocity and continuous testing, the scrum framework is highly effective among software development systems. 

Conclusion

These software development frameworks have both advantages and disadvantages. So, planning and efficient execution are more valuable than learning about these things. It is recommended to hire dedicated software developers or strategists to consult these strategies aligning with project requirements.  

Author Bio

Akash Guha is a content writer with a grasp of different web content creation. He has an interest towards writing website content for multiple industries like blockchain, mental health and finance. Also, he is aimed to write simple and easy-to-understand content. 

A 5-Step Guide To Successful Software Development Outsourcing

Posted on by Akash Guha

A 5-Step Guide To Successful Software Development Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a well-used form of software development strategy with considerable flexibility and time-saving benefits associated with it. Startups and mid-budget companies find outsourcers suitable for numerous reasons; nowadays, big enterprises are also altering their working strategy focusing more on outsourcing activities.

As there are many beneficial factors with outsourcers, a few drawbacks remain there too. Transparency is a significant factor; off-shore development processes aren’t real-time transparent (dedicated development is an exception), so proper planning and strategizing becomes crucial.

With a proper outsourcing strategy, a company may get the advantage of putting out quality development in exchange for money spent. But, a poor outsourcing strategy can ruin project development efficiency.

Thus, all of these concerns boil down to one thing, that’s a step-by-step guide for outsourcing top software development companies in usa. This blog is composed around the developer’s outsourcing process and the necessary things to follow. Stay Tuned!

5 Guided Software Developer Outsourcing Steps

1.  Clarify Your Requirements

Numerous software development outsourcers are available out there; not everyone will align with a particular project. Similarly, an outsourcing company possesses every required talent, but a project might need only an aspect of development. Before outsourcing, a company must clear every requirement, so they’ll not face any future discrepancies.

Companies must clarify their development requirements before consulting any developer. Here are some of the aspects that need clarification –

Lead – Does the company have resources to lead the project, or is it for the outsourcer’s plate?

Choice – Why not build an in-house team for software development?

Core Challenges – What are the core challenges that software development will deal with?

Clarification is only achievable with brainstorming. With software development outsourcing-related concerns, a company should follow this requirement clarification process to gain long-term understanding.

2.  Tech-Stack

Technical stack is the summation of programming languages and other requirements for any development project. Software-developing programming languages like Python, Java, and C++ are suitable technical stacks for a project.

Read Also: Top 9 Software Development Methodologies For Your Business Requirements

Determining the technical stack is crucial, as it affects various aspects like cost, time, and availability. Similarly, technical stack determination is an important step for easing the developer’s job and increasing project development efficiency.

For example, if software X requires only three programming languages, the cost will be limited to those three languages. A detailed technical stack will help programmers understand the core requirement and develop aligned solutions for software X.

3.  Budget

An outsourced software development team and technical stack come with associated costs. Based on previous expertise and working prowess, development companies can charge from four to six-figure prices. As developers are human, negotiation is a tricky yet convincing tool to optimize and alter development price from the developer’s side.

The majority of technical stacks are provided by B2B companies, and any negotiation skill will not be effective for gathering resources for each stack.

Like the above-written facts, development quality is also dependent on budget. Humans are emotional, and tightening of budget can scribe demotivational things to a developer’s mind. So, budgeting a software development team aligning with all the requirements is complex, but it is a must for companies to gain the utmost excellence.

4.  Researching A Suitable Outsourcing Company

After determining the outsourcing model based on the pre-defined requirements and research, the company is now available to outreach to different software development companies for consultation. Outreaching processes are dependent on the company, whether they’re choosing on-shore, off-shore or nearshore outsourcing. Here are a few things to clarify during the outreach process.

Developer’s Experience – A service-providing software development team will definitely have years of experience; check out what their experience level is. The company website is the best place to look for experience details.

Case Study – Check how a company has developed software for similar or different industries with their case strides. Website and developer portfolios are popular places companies put their case studies.

Tech Stack – Different software development companies, provide different technical stack services, so aligning the company tech stack with the developer’s tech stake is crucial for a discrepancy-proof development process.

Online Reviews – Online reviewing platforms like Clutch are the best suitable options for gaining the market’s perspective about a company. Service-providing businesses make their account on Clutch, and clients independently share their opinions about services. For projects that require ongoing user support and post‑launch care, evaluate partners that offer IT Call Center Services for helpdesk, remote desktop support, ticketing, and multilingual CX.

Looking for all these things in a portfolio is important, as these things will, after all, choose whether to consult a company or not.

5.  Consulting The Suitable Outsourcer

After choosing a suitable software development company, it’s time for an in-depth project consultation. A basic consultation begins with discussing their services, offers, and technical expertise. This is a reality check process, where a company should verify claims mentioned on the company website.

The second step is to project discussion. Planning a software development strategy discussing the requirements and time and budget discussion is usually done in this step.

If the conversation is still running, both parties sign a contract agreement, and the development process takes place.

Conclusion

Looking for suitable outsourcing is a complex process, but this 5-step guide is reliable enough for any company looking for software development outsourcing services. Of course, there’ll be more factors while applying for real. The outsourcing and consultation process will be different, not unfamiliar. Is there any other important process that needs to be in this guide? Let us know in the comment!

Author Bio

Akash Guha is a content writer with a grasp of different web content creation. He has an interest in writing website content for multiple industries like blockchain, mental health, and finance. Also, he is aimed to write simple and easy-to-understand content. 

How To Build The Best Legal Practice Management Software

Posted on by Shipra

Software development is the key to the future. Integrating all industrial sectors and services on an online platform not only increases efficiency, but also encourages growth and dynamics. Legal practice management software accomplishes all this and more.

What is legal practice management software?

Essentially, legal practice management software is a digital platform designed to help handle a law firm’s case and client records, billing and bookkeeping, schedules and appointments, deadlines, computer files and to facilitate any compliance requirements.

Every law firm is a business being run by a bunch of attorneys who probably didn’t learn management skills at law school. This causes invariable errors to creep into day to day to working of the firm. In addition, manual errors such as calendar and deadline related mistakes, shorthanded billing hours, and filing errors account for most legal malpractice claims, according to American Bar Association.

To erase such errors and reduce the learning curve, most firms have installed these centralized platforms with a hoard of features. Instant billing, file management, time tracking, document building, case management, client communication, calendaring, note making, legal database research, encryption and password management are some of the primary features most legal management software contain.

Law firm and case management

Detailed analysis on how to to build the best legal practice management software for your law firm:

First of all, let’s get into the basics of legal practice management software. What all features you need to build in to make it the best option for practicing law firms?

Billing and Accounting

Law firms usually bill by the hour which means time tracking is of utmost importance to avoid malpractice. Moreover, having an advanced timer that allows multiple entries can help manage multiple clients at a time. Some portals even offer automatic timers for case related emails and phone calls. Having an integrated mobile app that can remotely track time is an added advantage. That way you can continue working using your phone on billable time. All the time that has been tracked an instantly be converted into entries. These entries can be used to make bills, notes and answer client questions.

Along with billing comes the tedious accounts section. This requires meticulous work that takes care of all details. Most software allow you to download account activity from major financial institutions. They also provide you the ability create accounts, payable as well as trust cheques, process payments, perform batch billing all on one centralized platform.

Task Management

Managing the various tasks being performed at the firm and streamlining the entire process can help bolster efficiency and consistency. Using a task manager, thus, plays an important role in the day to day routine of the firm. Updating predefined procedures onto a template and sharing it across the platform can reduce the learning time of new hires. They can get used to the unique processes of a firm with relative ease. Moreover, instead of communicating with every team member individually about their jobs you can simply update the task template with their tasks.

Automatic Documentation

Almost every legal process involves the filling of forms and creation of documents such as retainer agreements, medical request letters, nondisclosure agreements etc. All these forms contain repetitive information which makes drafting the same document over and over again a waste of time. Instead, using software that contains automatic document creation can be a boon. Automatically generating forms using information that is saved in the software and sharing them when required is a necessary part of case management software. These form templates contain customizable fields that can be used to create unique forms.

Client Portal

Considering the sensitivity of most legal matters it is vital to maintain privacy for both the firm as well as the client. Somehow, emails and other chatting apps do not provide the necessary discretion. Thefts of private information from the servers of even the biggest software companies can put anyone on edge. So how does one ensure safety while maintaining ease of communication? The best legal management software comes with a legal client portal which can be used to exchange delicate information. These portals are 256 – bit encrypted that guarantees bank level encryption. The portals also have a mobile app integration to allow clients to share important documents safely while on the go. These documents, once shared, can be edited and added to task and document managers with one click.

Reminder system

Reports and Analytics

The one factor that separates the big guns from the smaller ones is data collection and its detailed analysis. Good software helps you keep track of data by crunching it into bite sized reports that have immediate impact. Collecting real time financial data, making comprehensive reports and analyzing the data for problem areas is a key feature. After all, it is rightly said only that which can be measured can be improved. Reports can include referral reports, aging AR summary, general ledger, account statement, profit and loss report, average matter duration, practice area breakdown, and billable hours efficiency.

Closing thoughts on legal practice management software

Once you understand the relevance of legal practice management software in law firms, software integration will be your top most priority. Also, keep in mind that features such as encryption and multiple timers are vital to the functioning of the firm. You can use ready-made online software. But, those online software offer you little flexibility to fine tune it according to your needs. Thus, hiring software developers with guaranteed experience is the best option. This way you can tailor the practice management software and the app to suit the specific nuances of your law firm.