Aug 30th, 2024
Why Smart Software Development Prioritizes Value Over Costs
There is an old saying that goes something along the lines of, “Cheap, fast, good–pick two. You can’t have all three.” While this is an over-simplification of the nuances of custom software development, there is some truth in it. It is exceedingly difficult to build good, quality software quickly and cheaply.
For decades, market competition pushed software development companies to prioritize “fast and cheap” at the expense of “good.” Beating a rival company to market and building a product for as little up-front cost as possible have become custom software development’s driving forces. But the tide is changing.
These days, people recognize that prioritizing long-term value over short-term cost is not only better for business, but also better for your brand, company morale, and (not to get too metaphysical) the world. So, let’s look at how prioritizing value over cost can save you money in the long run and improve your product and make your whole company stronger.
Long-term Value vs Short-Term Cost
The difference between long-term value and short-term cost may seem obvious long-term value is the benefit you will reap from your software in the coming years, and short-term cost is what it takes to produce it up-front. Figuring out your ROI requires careful planning and meticulous attention to detail to balance these two concerns.
Long-term value includes more than just financial ROI. A quality product boosts your brand’s value in the eyes of existing and potential customers. Users today expect speedy data processing, robust security, and a snappy interface. But they also want a software company to deliver things like fair business practices and a commitment to environmental sustainability.
And long-term value doesn’t only mean value to the customer. A codebase that is easy to deal with because developers spend time up-front planning for flexibility will save time for software developers down the road. A software development cycle that includes automated testing and deployment will take your engineers more time to set up initially but will make future revisions and new features easier to implement.
Missed Opportunities and ROI
When you focus solely on the cost of producing software, you set yourself up to lose out on potential ROI. Hiring less-experienced developers, cutting short the timeframe for development, rushing to deploy without testing, or skipping meetings about the exact specifications of the product can all lead to failures. At best, these failures end up costing you more time to fix later. At worst, they tank your product.
But not all cost-cutting strategies are bad. Some cost-cutting methods limiting the scope of features, simplifying the UI, or using less-expensive technologies in your SaaS tech-stack can actually be beneficial in the long run. It’s up to you and your product team to decide how to balance these concerns and make difficult choices up front.
Technical Debt
Technical debt is one of the most expensive hidden costs of software development. Technical debt is created any time a developer touches the codebase. As soon as you change a line of code, you have created technical debt. Some debt is small, it can be relieved simply by adding a unit test to ensure the new code doesn’t break the old code. Other debt is large, a legacy codebase that needs a massive refactor, or proprietary systems that need to be updated or moved to the cloud.
Measuring software quality mitigates technical debt and is paramount to ensuring quality products that don’t end up costing you down the road. Here are some of the metrics you can use to measure software quality.
Total Code Churn
Total code churn measures how many lines of code have been changed in the codebase during a specific time period, such as a release cycle or a sprint. “Changed” code includes anything added, modified, or deleted. A codebase’s total code churn has a direct impact on how much technical debt is generated.
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
The MTTD measures how long it takes a dev or support team to detect and respond to issues in the codebase. A low MTTD means low technical debt and indicates that you have a responsive and efficient system.
Crash Rate
The crash rate is how frequently the system crashes. A crash is a complete failure of the system that prevents a user from using any of the features.
System Availability
This is also referred to as “uptime vs downtime.” System availability measures how accessible the system is to users and can be affected by things like crashes, security breaches, or devs taking the system offline to upgrade portions of it or fix errors.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
The MTBF measures the average amount of time a system is operational between crashes, errors, or downtime.
How Cost Affects UX/UI and Sustainability
Your UI/UX is one of the most important parts of your system. It is the thing users will see and interact with most often. So, it pays to invest in the cost up front to make the UI slick and responsive. If you focus solely on cutting costs, you may end up with a user interface that is slow to load, glitchy, or simply unattractive, and while it may be tempting to brush these concerns off, the reality is that a good UI/UX design will do more for your brand and relationship with customers than any other part of your business.
Likewise, cutting costs up front also impacts the sustainability of your application. When you cut costs, you are more likely to incur technical debt, and the more technical debt builds up, the more it costs to bring it down. High technical debt will also put off experienced developers and quality software development services, who will not want to work on a difficult codebase.
Bottom Line
Prioritizing long-term value over short-term cost results in quality products that are beloved by customers. Not only that, but you will also attract higher quality, more experienced developers if your product is well constructed, low in technical debt, and easy to maintain.
