Software Engineering Insights

Planning is an indispensable part of any project management. When following the Agile methodology to manage a project, there are a number of approaches that can help a team to plan the development cycle and ‘User Stories’ are one of them.

The market demand for custom application development has grown five times faster than the internal IT organization’s capacity to deliver them. There is a continuous struggle to stay proactive against competitive pressure, resulting in a development cycle that is more tactical than strategic.

“The number one problem that I’ve seen for startups is that they don’t have product/market fit when they think they have.” Alex Schultz, VP Growth| Facebook

Books and their inexhaustible wisdom is no more limited to startups, students, or newbies in the industry. Bill Gates reportedly reads 50 books a year. Mark Zuckerberg reads a new book every two weeks and has a book club named ‘A Year of Books’

Enterprise software takes up a large part of IT budgets. With organizations aggressively investing in digital initiatives, there is a wide range of dissimilar and disconnected applications that have become a part of their portfolio. In response, CIOs are putting in continuous efforts to rebalance their technology portfolio, prioritizing their investments in the most efficient and much-needed software applications. 

When legacy systems hold back the business growth, IT teams race to modernize the existing solutions, thereby creating new business value out of them. The process involves technical or functional improvements, which may range anywhere between rewriting code, migration to a different platform, changing the architecture, or even replacing the entire system with a newer one.

Quite similar to the software development cycle, robotic process automation (RPA) is a strategic approach to automation. It requires thorough planning, defining timelines, managing resources, understanding compliances, and a lot more. That is why, RPA is considered as a journey, which comprises of 4 major steps for its successful implementation. 

Software Reliability Engineering and DevOps are two sought after disciplines, trying to maintain a balance between the software engineering and operations team. Since both approaches seem to sort similar problems, there is confusion if they are similar or can be used interchangeably. 

Building a software application is a complex process, comprising of a number of elements of which coding is just a small part. In general, a software engineering cycle looks something like this: 

GrubHub, AirBnB, Uber, Spotify, Zillow, Doordash. These are a few examples of successful businesses that have one thing in common- a creative software application. Today, it is hard to think of a business that goes without a software application. That is why, software development is a billion-dollar market, projected to reach $507B by 2020.