Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that’s worth making is software that does something new - Scott Rosenberg (Founding Editor, Salon)
This holds so true. Especially in the digitally-advanced times that we are living in right now.
Be it day-to-day things like getting food at your doorstep or large-scale employee management, there’s software for almost everything now. The tasks you couldn’t even think of doing a few years back are now a persistent reality. All this is happening due to the sudden shift of the software development industry towards digitalization.
Pandemic has pushed us to sustain through simplification. Software is more of a necessity than luxury on all levels now.
And this is the same reason why software development is thriving to this date.
As per recent reports, revenue in the software market is projected to reach US$608.70bn in 2022, and employment in software development is projected to rise by 22% between 2020 to 2030.
As we can see from the stats above, businesses (existing or new) want to bring about a change via digitization, introducing the same to their target audiences. We are seeing more and more companies emerge today with hopes of capturing a missed gap in the consumer sector. Soon we will have software to solve most of our challenges, whether work-centric (like communication software, finance ones, or more) or personal.
The bottom line is that software development is here to stay. ‘Custom’ software development, even more.
This extensive guide to custom software development will walk you through everything you need to know to become the market leader of your niche - from process to the costs and risks involved in hiring a reliable and trusted custom software partner. Whether you are just starting or you already have a product in progress, there’s always something you can learn to transform the challenges faced during software development into opportunities.
What Is Custom Software Development?Before we start with anything else, let’s try to clear our basics by defining custom software.
What is custom software development, exactly?
In theory, custom software development is the customization of the software product designed for a specific set of audiences that includes multiple stages like ideation, design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
It satisfies a specific set of project requirements and is performed by in-house development teams or software development outsourcing providers. It includes customization, modernization, migration, integrating the latest apps, and application management.
Commercial software products such as Microsoft Office and Sitebuilder.com come under custom software. They meet the generalized needs of official productivity and website creation.
Let’s check out how customized software development benefits businesses.
Yes, custom software brings many benefits, but don’t jump the boat yet. Just like everything else, your decision should depend upon the current state of your business or product.
The following section will talk about when shall you go for customized software development and why it matters so much.
In the era where software industry landscapes are ever-changing, the entire world is running after the custom software development trends and letting businesses continuously improve their processes and infrastructure.
Whether it is about developing innovative digital apps, super engaging and classy websites, or creating beyond imagination digital experience, organizations are now expanding faster to stay ahead in this competitive environment.
But the road to success is never easy.
Amidst market uncertainties and rapidly changing trends, businesses are struggling hard to stay afloat in the market of changing customer demands, competitors' offerings, and so on.
To overcome these challenges, organizations today are now looking forward to adopting custom IT solutions that help them achieve digital transformation since automation and digitization of non-digital processes lead to higher efficiency and better customer experience.
With the changing purchasing patterns, customer behavior, market trends, and needs, off-the-shelf solutions cannot satisfy customer expectations. They want an out-of-the-box solution with zero to minimal dependencies.
So, before making any decision, businesses also need to understand if they genuinely need customized software solutions or not. This depends mainly on what type of business they are and what they are trying to achieve with this.
And as we guessed, it won’t be the same for, let’s say, a CTO and a product manager.
This is why we need to get into our significant players’ heads and understand what challenges they generally face before starting with anything else.
CTOs (Chief Technical Officer) play a significant role in handling technology-related aspects in that organization, whether a startup or a product company, or big or small enterprises. They handle a majority part of the software development work. They also ensure that the organization is technically mature for disruption or digital transformation.
Even for CTOs, things are not as easy as it seems. They certainly face some challenges while ensuring the technical maturity of their organization.
Here is a list of challenges that CTOs face:
CTOs are responsible for handling all aspects of technology and performing innovation at all levels in a particular organization. They are liable to ensure that everything working technically is perfect without any disruption. They hold the responsibility for tech innovations in this digital transformation pace.
They constantly have to speed up with tech trends and new idea-generating. It’s entirely possible that while holding many responsibilities at hand, CTOs often do not possess the required skill set or the time to learn the newly emerging technologies like ML, AI, and blockchain.
Today's emerging business leaders want to onboard the best team of custom software developers having multiple expertise in trending technologies. But not everything seems simple; recruiting specialists can be too expensive for companies. You will require specialists in the required tech to compete in this competitive environment.
Most of the CTOs there find it highly challenging to find specialists for several reasons, and global boundaries can be one of them. Countries including the US and UK don’t have the desired IT skills, and still, if there are, the prices are incredibly high. Many CTOs preferred to hire developers to gain additional competitive advantage and talent.
Moreover, hiring someone that owns moderate to low skills in the specific technology might cause a delay in the project as you have to give them training.
Timely completion of the projects or meeting deadlines during each phase of the software development is a more significant challenge for the CTOs. And too, with the limited resources, their difficulty increases at another level. It sometimes also hampers the quality of the project.
They are mostly burdened not just for their projects but also for client projects they have to undertake.
CTOs must embrace modern technologies like AI, ML, blockchain, IOT, and others to innovate. Not every county or region has the required technology or the skill set to make that happen.
In that case, CTOs either have to drop the plan of pursuing software development or pay high prices to hire remote developers.
CTOS often faces the pressure of handling more extensive and more complex projects with the current resources present in-house. They need a bigger team, experienced and talented developers, and subject matter experts to take the project's complexity and make the process smoother and faster. All this requires expertise that not everyone will offer you for sure.
Hiring more team members certainly increases your operational cost, but at the same time, unburden your existing employees to handle the pressure of project complexity and let them work in free space.
One of the significant challenges that CTOs face today is technical debt. The thing they suffer most is software modernization. They have built software, products, and extensive enterprise systems using older or obsolete versions, which are not coping with the present technical change. They are dealing with the current market trends and technological updates. This certainly has created technical debt.
The role of a product manager is unique yet complicated in an organization as their job is to build a product from scratch or rejuvenate the existing ones according to modern trends. The challenges start from the former part and continue till later.
Here are some challenges that occur in the journey of product managers handling startups, SMEs, and SMBs are:
Product managers usually know what product to build, but they may lack an in-depth understanding of technical concepts or have expertise in the technologies required to make it happen.
Developing any product requires tech expertise, experience, and an in-depth understanding of them. It’s difficult for them to handle the project until they have tech stack proficiency access to the library and framework. Here’s where product managers or entrepreneurs find themselves struggling.
Software development is not a one-day process or not even a month. Sometimes it takes years to develop a final product ready to launch. The software completion should be within a given deadline and the specified budget, which requires well-strategized and prior planning to get software development smoother and faster.
For a project manager dealing with new projects, the resources, technical expertise, skills, and experience they come across might be inadequate. Sometimes, they may not fill the gap and hire more team members. It involves a certain amount of cost. It might be costly for them to do so.
A good and responsible manager always asks teams to share their opinions and thoughts on the direction of the product. Everyone on the team has a specific idea about building custom software and getting it into the market faster. It’s pretty challenging for product managers to listen patiently and take immediate action.
As a product manager, you need to keep the team and your decisions centered on facts. Decisions taken based on the facts might be fruitful to the business.
Be it a slight or a bigger one, every day comes up with some change in the custom software development industry. New competitors are emerging, new technologies are rising, changing work patterns, custom development processes, etc.
There happen to be a lot of advancements that can impact the success of your product and business. It’s quite challenging for product managers to adapt to the changing market trends and technology improvements. They may face software upgrades, skillsets, processes, and other difficulties.
Identifying opportunities and potential risks help them protect their business. They need to keep an eye open on what is happening in the software market.
.png?width=416&name=Chanllenges%20for%20CTOs%20-%20IMG%20(2).png)
As we can see from our pointers above, the decision-making criteria for CTOs and Product managers might depend upon the challenges.
Yet we see a lot of similarities too.
We have compiled some of the specific deciding factors companies can consider while investing in the software customization process - for both existing and new businesses.
Here listed four deciding factors that help existing businesses to scale their business with custom system development.
1. When You Need To Scale Your Existing Solution
Companies, specifically startups, often need to scale up the product and develop it with new features and functionalities that they cannot create with the existing resources. By opting for a custom software service, you can enable your business to be more efficient, quickly scale as you grow, and give you an extra layer of security.
2. When You Want Seamless Integrations In Complex Programs You Are Working With.
Your business likely uses a myriad of applications to solve multiple purposes. For this, they need faster and more smooth integrations with third-party applications. With a custom software development solution in place, you can create APIs and system integrations that allow your most critical devices to communicate and share data faster.
.png?width=416&name=Chanllenges%20for%20CTOs%20-%20IMG%20(1).png)
3. When You Need An Out-Of-The-Box Solution To Satisfy Your Specific Need.
Every company is unique and has its own set of requirements and issues that need to be addressed. They require an out-of-the-box solution that outstands the market to stay ahead of their competitors. Custom-built software is made with your business in mind, and new functionality can easily be added as your business scales and evolves.
4. When You Want To Automate Almost Everything.
Business operations can often be interrupted significantly by repeated manual actions. Automating manual operations that are encountered frequently in your business can save your time and money while boosting the efficiency and productivity of your workforce. With customized software, you can automate almost all your business operations.
Here are listed three deciding factors that help new businesses to scale their business with custom-developed software.
1. When You Have Sufficient Funds, But Not Enough Direction.
The development of a customized solution requires a rich skillset and a pool of expert professionals with niche expertise, time, and money. Above all, it’s the direction or the way to move ahead with personalized software development to attain desired results. There should be a proper direction or a roadway to get into the design and development of customized software.
2. When You Find Packaged Software Insufficient For Your New Project.
Emerging businesses using packaged software often find it ineffective to simultaneously perform all tasks on the same software. They have to use multiple types of software to perform a wide range of tasks. Using various software to perform single tasks may cause engagement and security problems. They are not able to generate insights into business operations.
.png?width=446&name=Chanllenges%20for%20CTOs%20-%20IMG%20(6).png)
When You Find Complexities In System Integrations.
An off-the-shelf software incurs a lot of complexities when it comes to system integrations. Packaged softwares are often not compatible with other programs.
With customized software solutions, you can have seamless and better integrations with the existing business systems. Custom software applications provide enterprises with a wide range of options for integrating different APIs.
Now that we have covered the major factors that will help you decide whether custom-developed software is right for you, let’s understand how it has helped others. That might give you a bigger picture of how businesses have been utilizing the power of modern custom web development.
We have compiled a list of top million-dollar companies that practice custom software application development in their initial stages for more clarity and real-life examples.
It’s pretty surprising that Amazon, the biggest eCommerce platform today serving its countless products and services in every corner of the world, was once the online retailer of only books.
The company continuously and rigorously satisfies customer demands from groceries to clothes, electronics, and other customer-related services.
Amazon is a massive marketplace where buyers and sellers can experience hassle-free buying and selling products. They use customized software solutions to lead the eCommerce industry.
Not every platform gets the attention and engagement of a larger audience. Still, Netflix is the one that is quite popular and in demand today due to its top-quality video streaming content. It currently captures the market of digital videos and outstanding user engagement.
The company is continuously working with custom software development services to add innovation to its platform. It also delivers a seamless user experience with content art customization to increase This includes constantly and rigorously satisfying subscriptions and user base.
For years, McDonald’s has been quite famous for its food menus (burgers, french fries, MacPuff, etc.). McDonald’s implements the best custom software ideas in managing their fast food services.
This is how they became the leader of a fast-food supply chain. It facilitates customers to get their food ordered from the app itself. All you need to do is scan and order whatever you want.
The company calls it the “Restaurant Experience of the Future.”
Most of us have to ride from Uber cabs to our offices, shopping malls, stations, etc. Uber provides the best and most effective cab services across the world.
They deliver a seamless experience to the passengers taking the ride with tailored software development. Till now, Uber has grown its market in the U.S. by 76% with the help of an intelligent system. You can easily book your ride from the app itself in no time. The company serves a unique and smooth experience to the riders by easily connecting them with a nearby driver. It provides them with the best experience for a hassle-free commute.
Custom software development has been the proven modern B2B solution that has fostered a digital transformation across all industries. You can also understand this with the Forrester report, which shows immense growth at a CAGR of 33% and reached $136 billion between 2011 and 2015. It indicates how fast custom-developed software will disrupt every industry in the coming years.
Customized software development is that effective solution that fuels your business growth in the long run. To avoid any confusion, here listed five reasons to let you know why custom software design and development is productive for modern businesses.
Today, modern businesses subject to cyber threats need the best and most impenetrable security coverage to save them from being destructive. As a business entrepreneur, you can rely on a powerful custom product that ensures data security and seamless business operations without any intervention.
Customized software applications that fit or fulfill their security checklist can stay in the market for the long term.
Businesses find customized software solutions to be one such that provides high-end security to your confidential business data. The software built ensures using confidential business data to the authorized access only. The user is notified of any such unauthorized third-party access to the software’s mainframe programs.
The success of any business enterprise depends on its organizational functionality, user experience, smooth business operations, powerful software, expert dedicated team, etc.
Investing in developing custom software solutions provides your organization with a specific business environment by addressing challenges to optimize your internal processes. Developing custom software solutions will ensure scalability and provide a long-term business value compared to CTOs.
You can simply invest in a customized solution to modernize your core functionalities. And make it more streamlined, systematic, and highly functional.
The return on the investment done will always outweigh the cost involved.
You have chosen the software that stays with you longer to solve a specific business purpose. Also, it can scale your business with the growing business needs.
You can add or modify inbuilt features and accomplish a task under extreme flexibility. Custom-designed software provides immense flexibility to the ever-changing business world to promote digital modernization.
Custom software ensures business longevity and profitable growth in the long run. You can be the game-changer for your business.
Developing custom software solutions proves beneficial to your business in simplified integration and process automation.
You can simplify, modernize and automate every process with large-scale custom applications and multisites that can smoothly work across all departments in your company.
With faster integrations, you can perform data exchanges and efficient collaborations in minimal time. Not only this, easy automation of workflows permits you to know the number of employees involved in a particular process. You can never have the automation feature in CTOS.
Designing customized software that fulfills specific user requirements can help you create a unique and seamless mobile and web experience.
Moreover, custom software can help you automate your business processes & transactions, process data information, satisfy security requirements, etc. You can entice your targeted audience by providing them with a world user experience that they will never forget. You can only do it with a customized software application in hand.
You just can’t rely on readymade software products to fulfill small business needs as they fall short on productivity in the long run. In that case, the ultimate solution is custom software development.
Today, software development is not about building a software product that satisfies your targeted customer requirements. Instead, it’s all about creating a top-quality, innovative, reliable, secure, customized, and pocket-friendly software product that meets your customer needs.
Talking about a software development process, specifically custom software development, the process is highly organized, secure and customer-specific.
The software customization process helps enterprises understand customer pain points and unlock customer needs and future demands.
But before moving further with the development process, let’s first understand and identify the buyer personas.
When designing or developing customized software, the first and foremost thing is determining your target audience. Or you can say who the people you are targeting your product to are? Do they need that? Or how you are going to engage them with your offerings?
Not only these, but many more questions might also pop up in your mind.
It’s all about diagnosing or identifying your buyer personas.
Before initiating custom business software development, you must be very clear with the questions and answer that.
What are problems am I solving?
For whom am I solving the problems?
Where will I find them?
What category do they belong to?
How do I engage them?
So, first, understand what the target audience means.
Target audience refers to a specific set of customers who are most likely to buy your product or service and have seen your ad campaigns on different platforms. You can segregate the target audience by age, gender, income, location, interest, etc.
More importantly, you can segregate your targeted audience into categories such as:
Audience with purchase intention: These are the set of audiences looking for a specific product and want to collect more information about that. The data here will make you see how you can better direct your message to your audience.
Audience with particular interest: These are people interested in some kind of hobby. The data collected helps you connect with your audience in a relatable way.
Audience with shared experience (subculture): People identify with a shared experience. These people define themselves by subcultures. And with that, companies can use those cultures to understand who they’re reaching out to.
They are also termed as buyer personas of a business.
Determining your target audience is a time taking process. You have to spend a lot of time analyzing the data you receive from customer engagements, evaluating current buyers, market trends, etc.
The first thing you need to start with is determining the targeted customers who have already purchased your product or have taken your service. Collect the data on how old they had made the purchase, their location, and their preferences. You can conduct their interviews one-to-one or ask them to fill out the online survey. You can better understand why your customers engage with your brand. You can conduct surveys on feedback platforms like Zonka Feedback, Google Forms, and SurveyMonkey.
Conducting market research can help you identify your targeted audience and understand customer behavior and patterns.
It provides you with a broad overview of the people who consume your product.
Moreover, you can also hire a market research firm to study your specific audience. They can quickly sell or share your research reports. Gartner provides yearly marketing predictions to help you understand what marketing trends customers respond to.
For more targeted customer analysis, you can check your competitors' strategies, marketing, promotion, and the customer segment they are targeting for their product offerings. Are they using online or offline channels? It can be a smarter move to spy on your competitor's doing to stay ahead of them.
Creating personas is a great way to retrieve specific target audience segments. It might be helpful to you as you have a broad range of customers. You can determine your target customers' demographics, personalities, and needs with personas. Buyer personas are created based on data, surveys, digital engagements, and other information marketers use to provide a complete overview of buyers.
There might be a group of customers close to your target demographic but will not act during customer interaction or messaging. Make sure you will be specific in determining who your audience is and who is not. Do not unnecessarily invest your time and money in choosing the incorrect audiences for your offerings.
Google Analytics stores comprehensive demographic data on your website visitors related to their location, interests, gender, and age. It can offer you extensive data about the visitors visiting your website. The information derived can be leveraged to determine critical insights, such as what channels your target audience is coming from or what type of content they’re engaging and like the most. It helps you to make more data-driven decisions.
Be it mobile app development, website creation, or software building, developing each is a complex process. On the contrary, any wrong decision taken in any stage of software development will affect the software quality and your entire business. Custom software development involves immense hard work, dedication, and rich expertise.
It’s crucial to conduct an in-depth market analysis and customer demands as it ultimately adds value to your business. So, let’s get started with a detailed analysis of every stage of the custom development process.
Coming up with innovative ideas is quite challenging as new technological innovations are emerging at a rapid pace. It leads to product managers thinking globally to create an innovative software product that offers something unique is considered an effective technique in the IT environment. All team members should contribute their ideas during meetings and discussions. Planning the product idea creates the prime requirements of the project and a roadmap that influences the whole development process.
After planning, the next phase is to design the product's technical architecture. In this phase, the team provides the business specification to technical teams, building the product’s architecture and creating workflow diagrams, tech stack, and DB design. It is simply conceptualizing the product. Here you start sprint planning or break down large tasks into more actionable modules.
In the end, designers are responsible for building the whole project structure.
This phase is the most crucial stage of the software development process. In this phase, developers started coding according to SRS's business requirements.
With every team member on board with the software’s proposed functionality and design, it’s time to develop the software. Whether you follow the Agile approach or MVP prototype, the main aim is to follow all the software requirements described in SOW to build robust, scalable, and efficient software.
After completing the development phase, an MVP product is the first release that few early adopters may mostly use.
To check whether a software program is working efficiently, you must perform software testing to avoid bugs and product failure. Testers perform in-depth testing to track and fix bugs. Here we simply release the product to a small group of beta testers or use UX tools to track how users interact with it.
During this phase, QA engineers test the code’s quality by using different frameworks and testing methods to check any bugs in the system. Testers report test cases and inform the developers of the bugs to developers to fix them. It helps them build a bug-less software product.
Once done with the software product, it’s time to launch your software in the market and let your audience access it. Your development team should now be confident about the functionality, usability, and stability of the product developed. After receiving feedback in the Alpha release, the team now moves towards the Beta release phase. The final product here gets the feedback from customers and makes necessary changes following that.
Last but not least, the next phase is continuous monitoring of the product, its usage, and future growth. The bugs are then fixed based on the customer responses.
We now understand that custom solutions help businesses to improve their customer interactions, optimize internal business processes with faster automation and streamline their collaboration with partners.
But how?
One of the most crucial points here is: change. To equip oneself with a scalable solution that could fit the changing customer needs. Improving customer satisfaction and retention, efficient operations, and increased ROI is the #1 priority for every business today, as it should be.
And that is one of the significant factors for a brand to stay ahead and competitive in this rapidly changing digital business environment.
This section will discuss how custom software helps you accelerate the development process while satisfying customer requirements with favorable cost and time.
Developing a digital product in an agile environment is about accelerating the development speed, reducing complexities, and customizing processes at each project stage. It helps you develop the fastest prototype that leads to further custom development. With agile software development, you can deliver your projects on time.
The process relies more on customer involvement and ensures speedy delivery of projects. As your project management breaks into smaller pieces, you can check each project step as it progresses. It provides greater flexibility as well as scalability.
Another thing you can do to accelerate your custom software development process is team expansion. Think about enlarging your team. The more team members you onboard into your team, and the less work will be assigned to each member. This will lead them to focus on their specific tasks and complete them on time.
Sharing the responsibility and delegation among team members accelerates the software development process. Effective and seamless internal communication between team members is vital to the success of every project. The more team members you hire with different expertise combined, helps you achieve your business goals.
.png?width=440&name=Chanllenges%20for%20CTOs%20-%20IMG%20(7).png)
Now that you have to speed up your software development process, you might determine how you will measure the speed improvement. Make sure you focus on actual measurements, including the number of tasks completed, to stay on track with the delivery date.
Always keep an eye on the number of tasks completed each day instead of looking at the number of lines of code written. Businesses always look forward to developing software faster and at a favorable cost. And you can’t waste it on rework, refactoring, physical meetings, etc. Your product will be a big hit if you all this thoroughly.
Another widely used and popular technique to accelerate your software development process is none other than outsourcing software development.
Software outsourcing is all about delegating your business operations to an outsourcing firm that adds expertise to your business. You can simply outsource a specific software feature or the complete software development whatever you want, which entirely depends on your business requirements.
Today, outsourcing has been beneficial to businesses of all scales and industries. It is the strategic move adopted by CTOs, product managers, entrepreneurs, and others to boost their business goals. With outsourcing, you not just have a significant amount of funds, but you can have access to significant expertise in IT operations and, of course, faster development. Outsourcing can help you solve all your business challenges and save money if done right.
Almost every organization wants to run its business applications with higher performance and lower costs. Isn’t it? With the assistance of cloud technologies, you can make your app migration smooth and seamless.
Today, most businesses use cloud platforms and technologies to move their existing custom applications to the cloud and are interested in building cloud-native applications.
Cloud technologies undoubtedly make the work of application developers more efficient.
To ensure that your software product provides greater profits and immense business growth, you must choose custom software development. Not only choosing, but you also need to follow certain practices efficiently to manage business processes and a smooth workflow.
Before building any software, app, or website, it’s crucial to define your business requirements, current process status, expectations, and metrics to measure success. Here we describe the overall project management process in three simple questions that you need to answer.
Make sure you have the answer to the given questions:
You can’t handle everything independently by making your in-house team work day and night to save money. For a smooth performance of custom software development, you need the following professionals to manage business processes and workflows efficiently. They are:
Outsourcing your process or an entire project to a software outsourcing company helps you get efficient and reliable software with the assistance of expert professionals in the end. These professional teams have successfully designed and implemented multiple custom software.
A realistic plan with achievable milestones is necessary to keep in mind to get a desirable product. You need to set up a skilled team of professionals that leads and directs you towards the overall objective. Creating a detailed roadmap is also vital for your business.
Make a clear plan to achieve milestones at each stage and keep the project on track. Review and get responses from immediate users at each stage to know whether you reach your set milestones or not. Also, planned the timeline or budget accordingly.
Testing is a crucial aspect that needs to be considered at the early stages of development to avoid bugs or failures. All kinds of testing (unit test, manual test, automated test, and so on) have to be performed by the testers thoroughly to keep track of every bug evolved and resolved. Test the software simply as expected.
Well, detailed and precise documentation for all stages of the software development and implementation is necessary for the smooth functioning of the software. Mention in the document what you have and what you desire.
Here is a quick checklist you need to prepare.
Custom software development helps you get used to the latest technology trends to solve specific crucial problems for your business. You should know how well you utilized it and when to support future growth and success.
The Global System Integration Market is expected to rise from $320.44 billion to $601.95 billion by 2026.
According to 451 Research, 90% of companies are on the cloud, meaning cloud infrastructure services account for the highest growth.
These statistics demonstrate the value that software integrations offer to modern businesses. It’s safe to say that business needs continue to evolve shortly (and even now).
Because customers demand immediate service, businesses must meet that demand typically in real-time.
Software and system integrations open seamless communication between software applications, creating more opportunities for enhanced efficiency, customer experiences, and cost-efficiency.
Software automation creates a healthy and friendly software ecosystem where you can simply automate your workflows. It helps you eliminate manual, repetitive tasks and reduce human error.
With software integration, errors are minimized due to data synchronization. It helps you gather your scattered data that requires manual movement. Data movement is automatic in an integrated system, which minimizes errors. With faster automation and integration, employees can now focus on other projects.
Modernizing legacy systems involves integrating modern software features and functionalities with existing business systems. Companies often looking for legacy application modernization either transform their current systems or integrate them with modern applications. Still, businesses can enjoy leveraging software integration tools that ensure smooth, secure, and seamless data migration.
Custom software integration facilitates businesses with increased interoperability, flexibility, and scalability. It helps entire information systems, devices, and applications collaborate with other business systems without any intervention.
Moreover, software integration also upgrades your security. With this, employees can only access data from an integrated system. This means better efficiency, improved data flow, seamless communication, etc. No more data breaches will be there.
With custom software integration, you can simply build a single system. This means the data will be in one place and ensures data accessibility. You can now access data anytime without any assistance. Also, with improved accessibility, you can save costs and time.
Integrated systems facilitate data automation which means better and smooth data flow.
The ever-evolving technologies will bring down a significant change in the software development landscape. Businesses need to keep up with these changes to stay ahead in this next-gen world. They expect to see remote operation, complete automation, faster deployment, optimized business processes, etc.
So, we have come up with disruptive technologies that will take center stage in custom software development trends next year without further delay.
The two modern ways of custom development are already mainstream and used by most businesses, i.e., IaC and low-code development.
Here we are talking about the composable application, which is the idea that functional blocks of an application can be dissociated from the complete application or process.
These applications permit any business module to be decoupled and enhanced separately without intervening in the rest of the application. They are more competent that can be created with better functionality and greater purpose.
You can find agile and composable applications faster to build and easier to innovate.
How have modern code development practices changed the way of doing software development? The rising cutting-edge technologies lower the burden of coders to make code development faster and easier.
You can simply do this with low code or no-code development. With this, you can create software applications with minimal coding. Low code development environments employ graphical interfaces and tools to develop applications quickly.
Low code is the type of development that enables non-coders to create software solutions independently. It lets a team of developers focus on critical development tasks.
These development options have gained momentum in the current years. According to a study, the global market will need 500 million apps built within half a decade. Another study has estimated, however, that 65% of future apps will be made with low-code tools by 2024.
You must have heard about Canva offering drag and drop functionalities to its customers. This is an example of one of the websites offering no-code development services.
Cloud computing was always and will remain in the technology mainstream in custom software development. Due to its high mobility, resiliency, and reasonable maintenance costs, cloud technology is used mainly by modern businesses.
Cloud-native apps always run on cloud computing architectures. It allocates resources to each service that an application uses, making it flexible and optimal to work in cloud environments.
According to a market forecast by Gartner, the aggregated end-user spending on public cloud services would hit $482.2 billion by 2022—up by nearly 22% from $396 billion this year.
Today, many companies will focus on cloud-native applications for uninterrupted business operations. Around 63% of high-growth companies have relied on a hybrid on-site and remote work arrangement to maintain organizational flexibility and profitability.
Earlier, an independent program was believed enough for a business to meet its commercial needs. But the technology landscape has entirely changed now. Modern technology has pushed the consumer's demands and preferences to the forefront.
The custom software applications have now supported external functionalities to provide a seamless and smooth user experience. The custom development has also encouraged in-house development teams to build applications with the existing frameworks and codebases. For example, Amazon integrates email and social media APIs across its e-Commerce platforms to enhance product visibility.
According to a recent study, 83% of companies deem API integration to be critical in their business strategy—with respondents citing enhanced productivity (59%), better innovation (51%), and revenue increase (43%) as the top benefits.
IoT infrastructure plays a vital role in software development, with around $639 billion projected market valuation by 2022.
IoT is all about having a seamless connection between intelligent home applications to create a seamless living experience for the customers in their daily lives.
IoT has empowered tonnes of industries to gather, deploy and analyze enormous data flowing through interconnected devices across diverse applications.
The large-scale business automation made it possible for companies to generate new revenue streams. The IoT development denotes the growing complexities of building applications beyond traditional physical devices.
Estimating software costs is considered crucial in the software planning process. Calculating the exact cost of development and efforts is quite challenging and tedious due to the dynamic nature of custom software development. Calculating software costs can even compromise the software’s success.
Estimation of the development cost is to be done correctly as it allows companies to gain control over software development progress. Also, it helps in reducing the risks and ensuring higher software quality.
Let’s find out what are the factors that impact software development costs.
One of the significant factors that impact the cost of the software is the size. Small-size platforms don’t take much time to develop the software as they get built on hourly rates. But, at the same time, massive projects will ultimately cost you more as they pay on an hourly basis. The size of the software always matters a lot as it indicates how much effort and members require to build software.
Moreover, if a product is to be accessed or utilized globally, a lot of effort and workforce is required as the size of the software would be large.
The software can be categorized into a basic version, moderately complex, and highly complex app. The more complex app, the more investment it requires.
In SaaS application development, the number of screens developed will decide the app's price. If there are more screens, the price will rise. Otherwise, it will go down. The apps with fewer screens are cheaper to develop than larger ones with more than 40 screens.
Integration, security, and data support features are the add-ons that increase the app’s complexity.
Software design cost includes UX/UI design, architectural design, and basic design of a website or an app. The website or app interface is the one that engages users at first sight with its visuals. An interface that is user-friendly and delivers a smooth customer experience. The menu, font, color, and navigation of an interface impact how you can visualize it.
Choosing a software development approach indicates how you conceptualize and create the software product or service. Different software development approaches and methodologies usually follow, including agile, spiral, waterfall, hybrid, or iterative processes.
The processes, methodologies, and workflow in each model are different. Each of the models works differently and has other costs involved.
Be it a freelancer or a development team; whosoever works on building custom software, the costs of developing them are different. On the other hand, if you hire an entire remote development team, the per head cost of a team is comparatively greater.
Though, this assumption is not always accurate. The cost of software development depends on the expertise and experience of the developer. Hiring inexperienced developers may expand the development process. So, it’s best to hire developer with a rich skillset to boost the revenues.
Custom software development for an existing business requires some degree of data migration. For this, software companies often prefer keeping a backup with the help of external databases.
Massive data storage and data migration are essential factors when developing eCommerce websites.
It also contributes to the software development cost. It all depends on the amount of information required to integrate.
Estimating custom software development costs is never an easy cakewalk. You need to consider all the software aspects that affect the software development cost.
Here are three main factors that most affect software development costs:
Here they are:
Type Of Software
The development teams usually develop four software types.
Each software type requires different team resources, time, and development efforts to build a specific software. Analyzing the kind of software is considered the first and foremost step in estimating software cost.
The second factor in estimating custom software development costs is the size of the software. There is a slight correlation between the complexity of a project and its size. But this case is not always valid. Here are the dimensions of the software.
The small size of the software involves minor changes. It includes small changes to the user interface or bug fixes.
The Medium size of the software deals with a single source of data. Software modules like small mobile apps or a web interface, or an existing inventory system come under this category.
The Large size of the software solutions includes more in-depth and complex software. This software requires integrating multiple systems, database components, security, and logging features.
The factors mentioned above (type and size) can now determine the possible timeframe:
The above table estimates a software project’s time frame. It shows you a quick estimate to customers regarding how much time software takes to complete?
Here is the way to estimate software cost: Project Resource Cost x Project time = Project cost
However, you may use some resources in more than one project as most resources do not work full-time on a project.
Every software development comes up with many risks, and custom software is no exception. These involve many factors that contribute to the project failures. Here we presented you with a few of them:
Being Over Ambitious: The arrival of a new software project into the company portfolio is always a matter of excitement. The team usually gets excited about the new idea, opportunities, and challenges of the software idea. Use an MVP approach at the initial stage of product development and avoid being over-ambitious in the early stages of development.
No Specific Aim To Focus: Indulging yourself in a custom software development process can be daunting if your vision or goal is unclear and defined. The software development process does not run smoothly or in the right direction as you don’t have a clear vision or aim. It is one of the significant business risks that startups usually face in their initial stage.
Poor Communication: The biggest loophole and a severe risk for project failure in the software development process is lack of communication. Proper communication is crucial to ensure that the entire development team understands the project requirements, aim, scope, and timeline. The developers should engage themselves in all project-related discussions and meetings to understand every aspect of the project developed.
Inaccurate Or Inappropriate Software Estimates: Flawless and regular communication between the team members and managers leads to a detailed understanding of budget constraints, requirements, and timelines. It enables development teams to provide an accurate project estimate and a clear vision of the overall roadmap to custom software development.
Product Failures: Software processes are developed and monitored but never upgraded. The product failure risk is one of the most significant risks as you have invested a lot of time and effort in the development process. The teams then lose interest in the product as they are not engaged in it through time.
Every software development comes with a lot of risks involved. Similarly, the risks associated with custom software development have risen, and many techniques and strategies that strive to mitigate the threats have evolved. The risk mitigation strategies have paved the way for the future success and growth of the software.
Custom solutions have the potential to experiment with anything innovative and customized.
To develop robust digital and customer-centric products, you need to make more strategic decisions while considering software development. For this, you need to start with an MVP development process. MVP is a repetitive development process that provides a digital product with minimal features and low cost.
Here you get the customer-satisfied product without investing huge funds. Your MVP would be the beta version to get your product idea tested by early adopters. MVP helps you test your product idea and transform it into a reality while improvising it or pivoting based on your findings.
Agile methodology helps you get the right custom product by managing business processes or tasks into a series of iterations or sprints.
With agile in hand, new modules can be added or reworked with each iteration/sprint. Agile development provides significant flexibility and scalability to your product and the business when combined with MVP strategy. It is essential as the software industry changes rapidly and efficiently with changing demands and trends. Incorporating new features and functionality into your product can significantly change your business.
As we know that trending technologies play a crucial role in custom software development, the skilled team of professionals takes ample time to research in-depth to implement them efficiently. Understanding each of the technical aspects while software development can be challenging. Also, it involves many risks for the developer’s counterparts. Finding the strengths and loopholes in the technical architecture takes you a path towards getting a robust system. Looking for a technical co-founder is a good start.
One of the significant reasons behind major software failures is the lack of a proper communication process. There should be no communication gap between the teams, managers, and clients. An appropriate communication channel connecting every team member with managers and leaders is necessary to boost workplace productivity.
Also, keep your clients in the loop. Regular meetings and discussions are essential to avoid misunderstandings. Project timelines, estimate concerns, development bugs, and scope are crucial points needed to discuss the smooth software development process.
Hence, clear and flawless communication during the entire software development cycle keeps all team members on the same page.
Once done with the software development process, you can now perform all kinds of testing conducted to track errors, bugs, or loopholes in the software developed.
There should be no room left for any bug. Developers must perform frequent testing to search and rectify issues that would have crippled the entire software. Testing at an early stage with efficient testing methods and tools ensures healthy and bug-less software delivery to the customer from start to finish.
Both in-house custom software development and outsourcing product development have benefits and drawbacks, and the choice depends on business objectives and project requirements.
Companies with the necessary resources can build in-house teams to develop custom software for their specific needs. In-house teams are beneficial since developing custom products requires a good understanding of business needs and company culture. However, hiring and training a team of developers can be costly and time-consuming.
Outsourcing software development processes can enable businesses to access a vast talent pool and offer more flexibility. For instance, companies can work with different vendors for different projects or implement a different engagement model according to the project requirements. However, outsourcing can carry security risks since businesses cannot fully control the development process.
Outsourcing custom software development for businesses has undeniable advantages due to which this development method is becoming popular day by day.
The custom software process allows you to scale your development team up and down. So, in that case, if you need to expand your development team to accelerate the development process, you can simply scale your staff accordingly. Urgently or to cut staff, you do not lose money. Also, you remove the unnecessary team if there is no project or the workforce demand is less for a project.
When onboarding an outsourcing custom software development company, you can establish and streamline business processes. With outsourcing software development, you can save a lot on hiring. Also, you can speed up your product development process. You will not have to pay if you don’t have any projects to continue with.
Shifting your custom development process to outsource custom software development helps your developers spend their maximum time focusing primarily on their core skills. The managers can now free themselves from the burden of marketing, engaging customers, the sales process, and so on with outsourcing, choosing the right technology, following coding standards, and performing the project on time.
When looking for the right employee with the desired skill-set for in-house custom development teams, you might find it difficult. Also, it takes a considerable amount of time and energy to search for the best skill. Software outsourcing provides you with various skillsets to find developers who own a vast library of knowledge and expertise in multiple technologies. You can select the best pool of talent that provides you with an optimized and robust solution that satisfies your business needs.
An in-house custom development team is a great option to start developing your digital products. Here listed some of the advantages that you can enjoy.
If an organization hires an in-house development team, they want to build custom solutions with in-house staff to satisfy the client's requirements. In-house custom software development is a process that is handled by the in-house development team. Check out the pros and cons of choosing an in-house development team to determine if it is the right path to contribute to the success of your business.
The in-house developer is an integral part of the organization. They know everything about the company's belongings, clients, business-oriented tasks, projects, etc. They may recommend improvements for a better work environment. They have the right to suggest changes that may lead to greater competitiveness. An in-house team member contributes to the company’s culture and, through their work, represents the business. The outsourcing firm understands your business in-depth to provide the best custom solution, but in the end, it will bring you a significant overhead.
The in-house development team comprises professionals from the same country/city with the same cultural and language background working within the same organization. Fewer limitations and face-to-face communication ensure the in-house team works dedicatedly within the same organization. All of them have the same working hours, and being in one office allows making the communication process seamless and transparent.
In-house developers master their skills in building the custom development they started. They show immense dedication and contribution towards custom software development. It will eliminate bugs and generate transparency during development. They have enough skills to create and maintain the product independently.
Despite significant advantages, custom software outsourcing has several disadvantages that you should be aware of.
Outsourcing custom development leads to interaction between different company cultures. This may sometimes lead to cultural clashes. There might be a language barrier problem between the companies. Not all companies understand the importance of communication, whereas is quite possible that others lack in understanding your business requirement. But this loophole can be fixed as there is a time gap between the two countries that can be used to communicate. Due to this, waste of time and money is possible. It also leads you to the wrong path.
The major problem with custom software outsourcing is lacking face-to-face communication. The whole development process is in the hands of an outsourcing firm. You have to trust your vendor as your time and money are invested. To ensure the security of your business, you should sign an NDA and outsourcing contract first with the utmost priority. The agreement guarantees the protection of your rights and project idea.
If you are outsourcing a vital product, ensure you maintain the code without the outsourcing firm's involvement. On the other hand, your business will depend on the outsourcing app development team. It’s crucial to maintain the software integrity between the two parties. The quality of the code depends on the integrity of the outsourcing firm.
Instead of having enormous advantages, in-house custom development does have certain disadvantages that you must know.
An in-house development team involves a substantial cost for your business to start custom development. Today, expert developers are in huge demand, and retaining such employees indicates significant salaries to ensure they perform their best. They have a competitive salary, and many employees enjoy extra benefits like healthcare coverage, vacation plans, etc. The costs will increase as your in-house team expands.
Selecting an expert tech candidate for a task is a time-consuming task. Seeking out these candidates takes considerable time and effort. Finding employees who will fit your software needs will take your valuable time.
Outsourcing your custom software development lets you engage a team currently staffed with experienced and skilled professionals, enabling the project to commence in a fraction of the time it takes to get underway while building an in-house team.
The ever-changing IT industry brings an overwhelming demand for tech professionals. It is challenging to hire the right skillset in some regions. The developer you find should fit into your planned budget or satisfy your business requirements. By outsourcing software development for your custom solution, you can balance IT staffing levels with your current business need.
How your software product looks and how efficiently it works depends on the dedicated efforts of both you and your company.
So, even if you make any wrong decision, it highly impacts your software product. However, if your every decision is correct, choosing the wrong software outsourcing partner may lead to severe product failure and a significant loss.
We have reached the most critical segment of this custom software development guide. Here we will help you identify the right partner for building your custom software.
The company you hire would take care of all your software needs like:
But the essence of it all lies in finding the right custom software partner for your product. So, how do you find one?
Here we have listed some quick things that you can check to ensure that you have found the right company. Let’s have a quick look at all of them.
The first thing you need to look at before planning to hire a software perfect outsourcing partner is the company’s size and team capacity. This will tell you if they have the required team members to build the right custom software or the entire team to do custom software development. You should ensure how many tech experts are onboarded before signing any contract.
Before making the hiring decision, the next big thing to consider is the tech stack required or the development methodologies implemented in the software development process. Your software development methodologies must match the company's development methodologies you are partnering with.
Any confusion or lapse might lead to confusion, missed deadlines, unfilled expectations, etc. Also, check on what development methodology they are implementing, including waterfall, agile development, kanban, or other working methods.
Onboarding a technology partner can help you overcome the tech challenges and provide you with a scalable tech stack.
Not only these, but you also need to check what frameworks and libraries they have expertise in. Also, are they proficient in modern or trending technologies?
When choosing a custom software partner for your software development, the next crucial thing to consider is their professional work experience and work portfolio. This will help you diagnose what type of products and companies they have worked on previously. Their work experience showcases how much expertise they gained in multiple technologies. A company that has worked on similar products would know the processes, scalability issues, and a team to build the same.
Now, last but not least, the most crucial part that the company undertakes is the software development process. Here you should talk about its development process and its project management. You should know about the software development process they follow, engagement models they use, time, cost and other estimations, reporting, and other things.
Here is a step-by-step process for businesses looking for a custom software development partner.
The first step is to select a list of potential and skilled candidates from a pool of talented resources. Here you find them in two different ways-
Categorize each candidate based on their expertise, industry experience, location, pricing model, etc.
Now shortlist all the candidates and check their entire portfolio in-depth. Also, check for the red flags if any candidate possesses ( fake reviews, scandals, law breaks, etc.).
Shortlist the honest and genuine candidates or a reliable company that can work hard to contribute to your software development process.
Before hiring a company, send them your complete project details, including objectives and requirements, and specify the time and budget constraints. Also, do ask them for the project proposal with quotes.
After shortlisting, it’s time to evaluate proposals given by the companies. Compare every shortlisted company with its proposals and budgetary concerns. Don’t rush into making a decision-making process; always be transparent in discussing even the minor details.
Do not give any false hope to any one of them. Also, don’t get tempted by low prices.
Before selecting the right software development company, consider three main points at priority.
Discuss these things with your partner before signing any contract.
There are three significant contracts that you'll need to negotiate and sign to ensure that everything is set and clear:
Any wrong decision in the software development process might lead to software failure. So, consider all the aspects that impact your business growth before deciding.
We’ve come up with a quick checklist for you to select the best custom software development partner and get them on board as soon as possible.
Consider all your project requirements to make an innovative and game-changing custom software product before hiring custom software partners.
Scan the business portfolios of all custom software development companies selected. Examine their services, technical expertise, and rich industry experience.
Perform a referrals strategy to hire a top custom software development partner.
Don’t get lured by the low development prices provided by a few companies. Always focus on your pre-defined budget for developing custom software. Take appropriate actions and decisions according to your budget.
Make sure the partner or companies selected are working on the trending technologies. The ones you are working on will be implemented while developing your custom software application. Moving ahead with traditional technologies might low down your business growth.
Decide on a fixed timeline and conduct meetings and discussions with your custom software partner to set all business objectives and avoid confusion or misunderstandings.
Also, your prime responsibility is to make sure that any software application developed should be highly secure and robust. Don’t compromise the security in any case.
With custom software development, companies now have the freedom to develop any kind of application that dominates the web development industry and stay ahead of the competition. You can create your desired software application based on the desired tech stack, rich skill set, expertise, and development methodologies.
This guide helps you with the top-notch custom software development companies to build the best, most innovative, and most robust software. These companies help you create excellent and custom-centric software right from the start.
Classic Informatics is a renowned global web development company offering customized and scalable solutions to its global clientele. Classic Informatics owns a team of 200+ software professionals working with it.
The Professionals at Classic Informatics tend to deliver reliable customer-centric software solutions to their global clients.
You can hire remote developers, complete remote teams, or outsource an entire project or process to a custom software development firm that delivers rich expertise in Custom enterprise application development, Full-cycle custom software development, mobile application development for Android, iOS, native & cross-platform, and Product development.
FATbit Technologies is a famous and renowned name in the eCommerce industry that practices agile methodology to build top-notch custom software. Clutch was also awarded FATbit in 2021 as one of the World’s Top 100 software development companies. The professionals at FATbit technologies deliver expertise in Custom software development, eCommerce development, Agile development, MVP, CRM, and ERP Development, Mobile applications Development, Digital marketing, and business consulting.
With a pool of 1600+ skilled specialists working and 12 office locations cited globally, Eleks is a leading custom software development company that helps businesses accelerate their business processes or workflows through custom software development, product design, QA, and consultancy services.
Moreover, they have rich expertise in custom software and enterprise application development, Product Design and Development, and Blockchain.
A3logics is a 17-year-old custom software development company delivering 1285 projects to 587+ clientele in more than 69 countries. They have a passionate team of skilled professionals who provide the best IT software solutions by leveraging Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and the Internet of Things. They provide expert services in Web Development, CRM Solutions, Enterprise Mobility, and Mobile App Development.
Iflexion has been a renowned custom software development company since 1999 that is best known for delivering software-related services. The company owns a team of 850+ talented professionals catering to 500+ clients to provide top-notch software solutions. They have rich expertise in Enterprise mobile apps, Ecommerce development, Business Process Automation, and Web and mobile development.
While focussing on achieving success with improved business processes and a dedicated team of professional talents, you need to concentrate on every business element that requires your attention.
Choosing customized software development is preferable for startups and enterprises looking to scale their business or product. We can make your job easier by helping you to select from the hub of custom software development companies that satisfy your software requirements effectively.
Classic Informatics is a custom software development company that provides you enormous benefits with a 97% client retention rate. It’s high time today to rethink and revolutionize an innovative business strategy to build a great digital product with low custom software development cost and time.
