If your software start-up is now an established business – congratulations! You may now be thinking about moving forward: expanding your business is the natural next step of the journey.
While expansion is a really positive stage, it’s also one at which many businesses become vulnerable. With the necessary additional outlay of funds and resources that growth usually entails, you may find your business comes under strain.
Being aware of these potential pitfalls is crucial to avoid them. Here are the things to be mindful of as your business prepares to begin the next chapter of its story.
Keeping Software Components Up to Date and User Friendly
Once your software has been designed and developed, it’ll need maintaining, monitoring, and keeping up to date to ensure it continues to deliver the best experience possible.
For example, if a rich text editor is one of your software components, be mindful of the accessibility of its advanced features. Some options may be user-friendly at a basic level, but attempts to expand functionality, add more features, or undertake fine-tuning may be a complicated, time-consuming affair.
With this in mind, therefore, look for an advanced rich text editor that will allow you to keep pace with a changing market, features easily configurable source code, and is designed to be easily scaleable. To further ensure that even advanced features will be user-friendly, look for an option that easily integrates into every element of your tech stack and a range of first-party integrations to make continuing development easy.
Training for the Agile Team
An agile team is a group of people working in cross-functional groups to test and find solutions relating to software development collaboratively. When a software company grows, while the new training needs of the programmers are adequately catered for, the needs of the agile team are often overlooked.
The result of this lack of training is the development of software is more prone to bugs and errors due to the agile team not being up to speed with the developmental methodologies required. Ultimately, this means there’s a real risk that the final software isn’t the very best version possible.
Ensure Effective Testing
As your operation expands, it can be easy to not fully consider the realistic need for additional testing capacity. The testing process can be time-consuming and expensive but can’t be skimped on.
If the expansion will put your current testing processes under stress, consider using external software testers to review the completed product and produce error reports. Alternatively, try using internal testers, working hand-in-hand with developers, for a more efficient way of testing and resolving any issues detected.
The Importance of Source Control
As your business prepares to expand, you’re likely looking at ways to formalize processes and ensure consistency across your operation and its provision of services. To this end, don’t underestimate the importance of source control.
Source control is a way of tracking changes to code, managing different code versions, and collaborating with other developers. Despite its many benefits, many developers either don’t use this tool or aren’t deploying it to its full potential. Lost code and merge conflicts are just two unnecessary problems that source control can eradicate.
Crucially, using source code also means that multiple developers can work on the same codebase without running the risk of overwriting each other’s changes.
Provide Technical Documentation
Not providing users with adequate technical documentation is a common mistake made by software development companies who are taking the next step up from the start-up stage.
Technical documentation is a critical way of documenting the design of a software system and its architecture and functionality. It also incorporates instructions for developers and users. Without technical documentation making changes to the software is likely to be extremely difficult; maintaining or improving application software may be a particular challenge in this case.
Put in place a process to create technical documentation relating to the software during the project’s design phase and to keep it updated as the project progresses. Also, be sure that all staff members are trained to understand the importance of producing technical documentation and how to do so.
Focus on Great Collaboration
And finally, as your software business expands, your workforce will also significantly grow. Ensuring high-quality collaboration between staff members is vital to keep everything on track and your new systems running smoothly. This may be tricky with a remote or hybrid team, but regular video meetings and collaborative tools can be deployed to keep communication between employees optimum.
As well as ensuring that developers can work together efficiently and easily, also consider how collaboration will work between different departments. As your business grows, you will likely need a marketing department, a research team, and HR staff – be sure to build great communication processes as these additional elements come on board to ensure that your whole operation runs smoothly.
The Future
By taking into account some of the most common mistakes made by software companies when expanding, you’ll have a great chance of sidestepping them, saving you money, time, and stress as a result.