With the pandemic at large, cutting costs has become almost mandatory for multiple types of businesses to keep afloat. The current times are filled with uncertainty. Minimising your expenses by the optimisation of your development processes can mean life or death for your company.
Now, you probably want to ask — “how do I cut costs without slowing down?” The demand for applications is still there. Still, even with a fast pace, there are numerous ways to optimise software development costs.
Look into your current software licensing
This may seem obvious, but shockingly, an average business has $259 laying around on each computer in the form of unused software.
If your software house has 100 developers, that’s $259 times 100 which equals $25,900. Not to mention additional staff like HR, IT maintenance, and marketing specialists.
This entire problem is most often caused by simple human error and forgetfulness. Someone might ask for a tool, use it once or twice and forget about it. Still, this is entirely normal, and there’s nothing to be angry about.
Now, by doing regular audits of what’s actually in use in your company, you could save a big chunk of your expenses. Conducting a survey among your workers can be a great way of assessing your unused licenses.
Evaluate the efficiency of your current processes
An internal assessment of your team’s efficiency is necessary to ensure the proper functioning of your business. Identifying any possible roadblocks, obstacles, and bottlenecks is key to establishing a well-oiled machine.
While such an audit takes time and requires sufficient data, it’s entirely worth it. Prior to taking a project, make sure that you’ve got enough resources to make sure that you meet the deadline.
In case you find any shortcomings, then perhaps the best way of complementing your team might be staff augmentation through nearshoring.
Utilise nearshoring
Nearshoring is one of the top trends in software development. It’s far cheaper than onshoring, and the quality of end products is better than in the case of offshoring to countries such as India. Nearshoring can be seen as a middle ground between quality and price. Augmenting your staff with additional specialists for the duration of a project is a much better solution than hiring them in-house. Comparing in-house vs nearshore costs, nearshoring comes out on top significantly.
Nearshoring to countries like Poland, especially for Western European companies, can prove to be the best type of outsourcing. The developers there are among the finest, and similar time zone and close proximity ensure that communication will be seamless.
Implement DevOps and Agile
DevOps is an environment that facilitates the communication between developers and other departments to a great extent. Instead of treating your departments as separate ones with differing priorities, DevOps creates an opportunity for integration. The more closely your teams work, the more they know each other’s goals, the faster you’ll deliver high-quality products.
The same can be said about Agile. While a great part of software houses operate under that methodology, some are still reluctant to accelerate the switch. Agile ensures flexibility, communication, and speed by working in quick sprints.
Hire interns
Having an internship program lets you delegate some of the easier tasks to them. This will enable you to reduce your attrition rate and help you find talent.
Make use of cloud computing
While I talked about ditching unnecessary software, don’t forget that it’s more cost-effective to buy ready-to-use solutions for your business processes. Cloud makes that possible. By using SaaS products, you can enhance your HR, marketing, finance departments’ operations.
As such, your developers can make use of the cloud as well. IaaS can let you cut costs of resources required for development, and PaaS provides the means to save on maintenance of on-premises hardware.
Cheaper hardware
Cloud makes you save money on hardware. Still, you could assess the current situation of your machines. Perhaps some processes could be run on cheaper computers. Conversely, your machines can be poorly optimised for your developers’ tasks. In that case, instead of saving on hardware, you’ll save on efficiency.
Use open-source
There are tons of open-source software ready to use for your developers. Instead of resorting to costly solutions, find out the best possible combination of open-source software in accordance with your developers’ requirements. On top of that, since you have access to the product’s code, you can make any modifications yourself.
Since there are multiple contributors to open source software, updates are rolling in quite frequently. The developer community is able to look into the software’s source code and find any possible issues quickly. Instead of relying on a single provider, you rely on hundreds of people who are ready to make your life easier.
Release a Minimum Viable Product
If you’re developing an application as your own project, then a great way of testing it is releasing a Minimum Viable Product to early adopters. An MVP is a version of your app that has just enough features that will be useful to your clients.
That way, you’ll be able to find out your customers’ willingness to pay for new features, as well as identify current issues with your software. You’ll also get to see the reception and see if you disrupted the current market. Early adopters are more than keen on giving feedback if they find your application valuable.
