How To Reduce Your Software Development Costs

Software development costs can easily rack up, particularly if your project is complex and involves integration with multiple systems. 

As an IoT software development company, we can tell you that costing a software project isn’t easy but we always try our best to keep costs as low as possible. 

If you want to avoid overspending, there are some things that you can do as a customer to make sure that you control costs, avoid spiralling and maintain a high level of quality. 

And in this blog, we’re going to share those things with you.

Using the iron triangle to manage development costs

The iron triangle of project management is a handy approach that can be used to deal with constraints and, ultimately, bring down your software development costs.

It has three points which represent these constraints: scope, time and cost. And in the middle of the triangle, is quality. It looks like this:

The idea is that you need to keep the triangle balanced, otherwise quality will be compromised. If you try to reduce the time without also adjusting the scope or the cost, you won’t get the results you want. 

Another way to look at it is that we offer three things: speed, value, and features. You can choose two, but the more you stretch those two, the more the detriment to the third. So you can have a project that’s fast and cheap, but you’ll have less scope for features. Or you can have a project that needs to be fast and have a lot of features, but the cost will be higher. 

A lot of what we’re talking about are things that we know can significantly increase the time and scope of a project, and thus need the cost to increase proportionally if you want the quality you’d expect. 

Technical debt and software rot

Another concept you should keep in mind is technical debt. This is where you decide to forgo a design feature you know you’ll need, but weigh it up as better left until a later date when you have more information. It’s worth keeping this in mind as a reminder that savings at the start of a project can lead to paying more further down the line. So make sure that you take on technical debt knowingly. If you work with us, we’ll highlight this at the beginning of the project. 

Linked to this, although not the same, is software rot. This describes the reality that software does rot over time if it is not maintained. Platforms, plugins, software libraries — they all march ahead. And version 15 of the operating system might introduce new data, security or privacy rules that impact the current code base. 

Which project elements can increase the cost of software development?

With all this in mind, let’s take a look at the elements of a software project that tend to have the most impact on the cost. These are things that you as a customer can keep in mind at the outset of the project when you’re thinking about your requirements, especially if you’re working to a tight budget or a tight timescale. 

Configurability 

The more you want to make your final product user-adjustable, the more development workshops and design sprints it will take to get this right. This shouldn’t put you off adding this to your project, but it should make you think about how necessary it is.

Complex reporting

Many projects will require reporting of some kind, but the more complex the reporting becomes, the more the cost can ramp up. This is especially true if you want to add custom reporting. This just means it’s important to consider what you need to report on very carefully at the start of the project.    

Scalability 

Everything we build has scalability in mind. When scalability has to meet the needs of over a million users a month, it can become expensive. Of course, this is a cost that’ll return a healthy ROI if you have that kind of traffic and consider the cost of trying to develop cheaply and the system falling over. 

Added security 

All of our software comes with security built in, but certain software requires a higher level of security, depending on the kind of data it’ll be using. If your database contains financial information, information that can personally identify people or other data that’s under regulation of some kind, then the cost of securing this data will be higher. 

Third-party integrations 

Working with third-party APIs is usually a part of any software project. But some not all third-party integrations are equal. Some are much more complex to integrate with and prone to problems down the line, and this means much more work upfront to ensure long-lasting stability in your software.

Your development costs are linked to scope and speed

Of everything we’ve talked about here, the most important and essential fact to keep in mind is that the cost of any project will always be intrinsically linked to the scope and the speed at which you need it. 

On the other side of the coin, this means that in terms of scope and speed, you can achieve your goals, pretty much no matter what they are, as long as you can increase your budget to accommodate it!

Another way to avoid spiralling costs, which we haven’t mentioned already but which is worth keeping in mind is HiLo. This just means that you should focus on big value and low-effort features, and avoid complex rabbit holes where possible.  

Keep all this in mind when you come to scope your software project, and you’ll be in a strong position to keep your costs low both now and into the future.

If you have a software project and you’d like to talk to us about the costs and how to keep them down, then book a call with Mark today.