The Development Process
Following the industry best practices for software development ensures a sound understanding of requirements, development of a component system that makes it easy to manage and expand, and continuous verification of software quality during the entire life-cycle of the project.
The inevitable consequence of not following these practices is costly. As the chart shows, the cost of fixing flaws is exponentially more expensive as you progress through the project.
Experience has shown that there are some standard reasons why software development projects fail:
- Ad hoc requirements management - missing the boat on what is really required for a positive outcome
- Poor communication - not listening to what the customer needs, even if they don’t know WHAT they need
- Insufficient testing
- Insufficient automation
- Poorly designed architectures - not utilizing the state of the art options available
- Unrealistic delivery dates - underestimating the work itself
At GIS we know what COULD happen, and we take every step to assure that these problems DON”T happen. Some of the key practices we use include:
- Developing software iteratively
- Manage requirements
- Use component-based architectures
- Visually model software
- Continuously verify software quality
- Control changes to software