How To Negotiate Fundamental Challenges in Software Building
Communication with the developers' team can become one of the most challenging processes for the company that requires an advanced software solution or starts a new project. In any case, we used to hear from management and administration teams that developers were too slow in building software, there were many conflicts with them, and developers often refused to perform tasks. As a result, the organizations decided that developers used to say "No" for every job and didn't want to produce high-quality software in time.
In most cases, this is the wrong view of developers' work. This article will outline the fundamental conflicts that can interface software development and the most common challenges in this field. Explaining each challenge will help understand, predict the problems, and ensure good communication inside the dev team.
Fundamental Challenges in Software Development
Today almost every industry has a solid connection to information technology. Each sector can have its specific challenges in software development, but in this text, we focused on the problems that every industry and its development team can face. Understanding each of the issues will help to change the situation in general.
Lack of Technical Requirements
One of the most common problems can be caused by unclear requirements for the developers' team. Moreover, the conditions can be incomplete, quite general without specification, or not testable. In some cases, backend developers cannot see the application as they do not have an API. It means that the coding process is blocked, and they need to solve this problem before moving to the next stage.
Absence of Clear and Achievable Goals
Another problem that can break the speed and quality of development is the team's absence of clear and realistic goals. Developers need to focus on achieving the plan, and it is tricky to do without clearly establishing those goals. It is the primary management problem you can face in the development process. That is why you need to define the project goals and facilitate those goals for the team.
Poor Architecture of Existing Software
The next challenge for the development team is the lack of resources and poor software architecture. The team does not have enough advanced software development tools, platforms, or secure data storage architecture. It makes the developers less productive and effective in coding. To solve the problem, you need to invest in software architecture first and make it available in the development, testing, and monitoring phases.
Complicated UI Design
The next challenge is connected to cooperation with the design team. In any significant development project, you can face the following design problems:
- poor processing of screens
- lack of reusable elements
- unreasoned navigation
Each of those problems can influence task management and development speed. You need to ensure design optimization before starting the development process.
Inefficient Test Coverage, Especially on Big Projects
If you have inefficient testing of software, you could not evaluate the quality of software. You will learn if it is good or bad only after it crashes. That is why it became essential to ensure a high testing coverage rate to make development work more focused on fundamental issues. The only way to avoid this problem is to provide software testing in a real-time environment.
Conflicts Between Different Development Teams
It is an issue that development and testing teams can have conflicts during their work on the project. There is a list of factors that can be a cause of such a conflict between groups. First of all, team members can have different mindsets or work under high-performance pressure. Also, those teams can have different approaches to the project, and it can cause a conflict. The management task is to figure out those conflicts initially and focus on solving this communication issue in time.
The Gap In Communication Between the Development Team and a Customer
The next problem can occur between the development team and a client in case of miscommunication. It means that the developers can have incomprehension of tasks and goals of customers. On the other hand, customers can have false expectations. To solve the problem, you need to build a solid line of communication between the dev team and customers. You need first of all to define the scope of the project, communicate all the customers' needs and expectations, and create precise requirements for developers.
Adding New Complicated Features to Performed Software
The other challenging thing is adding additional and complicated features to the software that can destroy the developers' work. Clients often want to implement the latest market trends in the last minutes without discussion and preparation. At the same time, you need to have resources to implement those trends. The best option is to outline all the features you want to have in your software before developers start the coding.
Final Thoughts
One of the most important goals for almost every business is to ensure a well-established work process and high speed and product development quality. Solving those developers' problems we outlined can be a difficult task. Understanding the fundamental issues that developers can face will help business management to build productive teamwork. At the same time, best practices in managing development-testing crises or solving miscommunication gaps can create an efficient development environment.