Need a Customized Software that Supports your Business Model? – A Guide to Ultimate Custom App Development

Industry landscapes are constantly changing. And to survive and succeed under these circumstances, businesses should be ready to continuously update their processes and infrastructures. Custom software development is an indispensable part of businesses’ successful development as it helps to effectively adapt to changing trends and the market’s needs and wants.

With the assistance of custom software development, businesses offer their customers a unique user experience that makes them stand out from competitors in the market. Apart from that, it also saves time and money for growing companies and their IT infrastructures. Providing that custom software development gives so many advantages to businesses around the globe, I offer to have a look at its main benefits, methodologies, and steps of the custom software development process.

What is custom-built software? Custom software is the software built for a specific organization or user. It aims at a narrowly defined set of requirements.

What are the main benefits of custom-built software?

• It’s tailored to your needs. Your company is unique and has its own combination of needs and issues.  Tailored products keep in mind your business, any new functionality that you need can be easily added as your business evolves and scales.
• It’s suitable for a wide range of industries. Custom software can be built for companies engaged in all industries, from banking and healthcare to manufacturing and retail.
• It automates manual operations. The automation of manual operations saves time and money, as well as boosts the efficiency of your employees.
• You can save money in the long run. Off-the-shelf software development may seem cheaper initially, but some ready-made solutions will have licensing fees that need to be paid on a monthly or yearly basis.
• It gives you better security. Hackers often aim their attacks at off-the-shelf software programs for they are designed for a wide range of companies, consequently, the program code is easier to hack on ready-made software than a custom one.

What are the main project management methodologies of custom software development?

When searching for a custom software development company, it is important to make up your mind concerning which project management methodologies will work the best for you. There are 7 separate project management methodologies, each one using a different approach and workflow to achieve the goal of finishing a project.

#1 Waterfall Project Management

Waterfall project management is a model of cascading sequential planning of the entire project, where each previous stage in the sequential development chain is followed by a subsequent one. It is rarely used in modern software development as the creation of a detailed and feasible plan using Waterfall takes too much time. Changes are discouraged and costly.

#2 Agile Project Management

Agile project management is more modern and versatile than the waterfall model. It involves shorter project cycles, constant testing and adaptation. Hence, it’s a good choice for projects that demand lots of flexibility.

#3 Scrum Project Management

Scrum project management is a derivative of agile project management that gives priority to various tasks. Projects that need quick movement are perfectly suitable for scrum project management as it divides projects into small pieces and uses sprints to accomplish them.

#4 Kanban Project Management

Kanban is about balancing the workload of a team to produce exactly at the right time. It helps visualise the work, so you can acquire a better understanding of your workflow. By doing so it’s less complicated to organize and manage work more efficiently.

#5 Lean Project Management

Lean project management is a model when resources are spent as efficiently as possible with a focus on achieving basic business objectives and neglecting insignificant ones. The main principle is delivering more value with less waste in a project context.

#6 Six Sigma Project Management

Six Sigma project management is a consistent quality improvement methodology. This methodology used to find and address the weak points that hinder efficiency. Six Sigma is referred to the goal of reducing the number of manufacturing defects to less than 3.4 per 1 million units.

#7 PRINCE2 Project Management

PRINCE2 method minimizes errors and risks while maximizing efficiency, that’s why it is favoured by private sectors in the government. It divides projects into product-based steps so they can be worked on one at a time.

What are the main steps of custom software development?

Once we’ve defined the main benefits of custom software development and major methodologies of it, it’s time we focused on the steps of its development.

#1 Define Business Goals

After identifying the requirements of the business, it will be less complicated to choose what functionalities the applications must have to address and cope with the hardships. In such a way, an organization will get a custom app that will be perfectly tailored for business needs and will meet business goals in the best way possible.

#2 Decide on Technology

The technology stack is chosen depending on the functionalities of your custom app. When they are discussed with the software development team and approved, it will be easier to decide what technologies will make it possible in the most efficient way.

#3 Focus on Development

After choosing the right technology stack for your custom app development, developers will start writing code focusing on all the requirements. It will meet all the requirements of your software, as well as consider the needs of its users.

#4 Test

Testing is one of the most crucial steps of the development process, as it gives you more confidence in the quality of the code and the final product. It is important that testing is done after every development part of any type of software, to control whether the application is secure enough and its performance has no problems. That’s why, when hiring an app development team, always make sure that they are experienced enough in testing and securing a custom application.

#5 Deploy

It is at this stage when we can see how fast the software responds to changes depending on its user’s preferences.

#6 Integrate

If the custom application answers all the requirements, it is time you started the integration with your current infrastructure or third-party software systems. Your development team will ensure the application’s smooth and untroubled performance with other systems and safe and quick data flow between them.

#7 Launch

After the successful performance of all steps mentioned before, you can finally launch your custom app. It may be required to participate in the performance of previous steps in case some additional information or consulting is needed. If you and your development team reach the complete agreement that everything works the way you expected, you can proceed to the launch.

#8 Support and Maintain

Make sure your team is ready to work with you even after the launch and to provide support and maintenance for your ready product, to fix all the bugs and ensure an efficient work of your custom app.

To sum this all up, it is fair to conclude that custom development is by no means on the rise, and custom software development companies all over the world are in high demand. Investing in custom application development is a must-have for successful business performance because the way companies operate has changed dramatically over the last decade.

Having mentioned all the advantages that custom applications give to companies, the most crucial of them is the opportunity to improve the internal workflow as well as provide your customers with a unique experience. Now that you know what custom software development is, the strong sides that it has, popular methodologies and technologies, the most valuable steps of the development process, hopefully, it will be much easier to make decisions related to this topic.