Despite the many debates on the viability of custom software development as a business strategy, the 21St century has seen a massive increase in the custom software development market size. A report from Statista states that over the past year, the custom software development market amounted to $209.4 billion.
With such a large number to its credit, is custom software development just another fad, or is it an opportunity worth taking advantage of, especially in your enterprise’s first few years?
Some of the obvious advantages of outsourcing custom software development are eliminating the need for office space, setting up infrastructure to support development, and hiring, training, and remunerating an in-house team. But these advantages are merely surface level. The actual core is a lot deeper.
In my experience, choosing Custom software development can be a make-or-break situation for an enterprise. In this article, I have touched upon 8 reasons you as an enterprise should choose custom software development. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
An end product crafted bespoke to your unique needs
When you start to outsource software development tasks, the acquisition of talent is no longer limited by geo-location. Your primary hiring criteria can now seamlessly shift to skillsets and professionalism from your team’s proximity to your worksite.
With a little bit of groundwork, such as browsing a potential outsourcing partner’s portfolio, checking testimonials, client feedback, reviews, and testing products delivered by the company, you can very easily find a team that is a good fit for your project needs.
With custom software development, your enterprise gains access to an immensely deep pool of world-class development talent. You can now optimally create your envisioned product tailored precisely to your needs, with a slick, fat-free output that matches all features and functionality requirements.
Access to deeply knowledgeable and experienced resources
Acquiring custom software development services is a brilliant way for enterprises to compensate for lack of internal resources, allowing the business team to focus on core tasks. With custom software development, all your enterprise needs are a product idea. Software development outsourcing offers immediate access to a complete suite of services covering consulting, marketing, analytics, design, and development.
With custom software development, you can convey your project specifics, type, and budget to the outsourcing partner and directly proceed to development in strict adherence to the above facets. You could also choose to have your outsourcing partner create a minimum viable product (MVP) and then analyze and interpret the data it yields to develop your final product in alignment with what the market needs.
A perfect balance of capability and cost
Off-the-shelf software can sometimes prove expensive with massive monthly subscriptions and unending internal purchases. Custom software development solutions can offer your enterprise the opportunity to strike the perfect balance between development capabilities and development rates.
Given the broad geographic reach afforded by outsourcing, you can acquire teams from custom software development hubs like India or Eastern Europe. There the cost of living is a lot lesser, resulting in considerably lower development costs.
India ranks high on the list of the best value for money outsourcing locations, and you can rest assured that once you hire software developers, you will receive quality service and world-class end products with an optimal balance of expertise, creativity, functionality, and cost for your custom software development project.
Ability to gather the best professional team
Hiring a fully functional in-house team can throw you off schedule quite severely. As an enterprise looking to launch a product successfully, not only do you need developers to write code for your project or DevOps to deploy it, you also need proficient business analysts, designers, QA professionals, PMs and so on who follow trends in technology.
If your project requires specialized skills such as VR or AI, finding such experts will be an extremely time and resource-intensive task. With custom software development, you can redirect your time and resources to your product’s actual building.
An ideal software development partner will come pre-fitted with a complete team with the skill sets mentioned above. On the off-chance that additional resources are required, the development partner can quickly recruit known, vetted, and trustworthy professionals from their repertoire of outside experts. At the project planning stage, the project manager at the outsourcing company can propose team compositions aligned to your enterprise’s needs and draft an approximation of the time required from each outsourced collaborator.
Effective inter-team communication
Effective communication is integral to efficient collaboration. An ideal development partner will come equipped with the latest tools and platforms required for lucid communication, thus almost eliminating the need for spending time and efforts on building a collaborative environment.
Custom software development companies sport cross-functional teams to work together, resulting in high-quality output delivered in the fastest and most effective manner.
Application of the Agile methodology
Lean development is critical to software development by an enterprise as it minimizes unnecessary expenses, correctional tasks arising from flawed management, ineffective communication, project complexity, and poor coordination.
Almost every capable custom software development company today follows the agile methodology to achieve the lean approach. In the agile model, product development is broken into sprints where each sprint has an objective termed the product increment. The product increment is usually a feature, or functional component tested and demonstrated to you once the sprint has ended.
The agile methodology allows ample breathing room for revision and iterative development on the go to effectively adapt to changing requirements reducing the need to re-work completed components.
Easy scalability
During the SDLC, your project’s scope might fluctuate, resulting in changes that need immediate implementation. Scalability in teams, both up and down, is, therefore, an imperative. In contrast, with custom software development teams having such scalability in an in-house setup is not possible.
In the case of an in-house team, finding additional team members with the required skillsets, especially when the team is stretched out already, can be difficult. Reducing team size is also an issue as dismissing people can affect team morale. It also means that you have to keep paying salaries to keep them on board for future projects.
In Summation
From user-facing applications to enterprise software solving everyday functional and operational challenges for your enterprise, every business needs a hyper-aligned team to bring its vision to fruition.
Custom software development can help your enterprise overcome scalability issues, need for micromanagement and even offer you a massive talent pool to choose from. Today, numerous enterprises hold custom software development as a go-to practice to reap benefits of cost, time and resource allocation, and in our opinion, so should you.
