Software Development Guide for CEOs

Everyone looks to you to make decisions as CEO. Of course, you delegate tasks and decision-making throughout your organization, but you make the final call at the end of the day. That includes major software decisions. Which can be stressful when you’re no software expert.

Many developers specialize in one software or language, and that’s not enough. Your software needs are too varied. That leaves you reaching out to multiple developers to keep everything covered, and figuring out who to hire for what software project.

Thankfully, you don’t have to be an expert – after all your job is to lead, not to know everything. Hiring a comprehensive software development company like KNDCODE, allows you to delegate yet another task to qualified professionals without being bogged down by minutiae.

Our team has an expert for every software discipline, field, and language so you don’t have to worry if you picked the right team for the right project because you hired the right team for any project.

Previously, we wrote about some of the most important areas of software development like configuration, infrastructure, frameworks, and security. A comprehensive software development service can handle all of them at once. This approach is much more efficient and cost-effective than getting each service from a different source.

However, even with a comprehensive software development service at your disposal, it is still important to have a basic understanding of how the different pieces of the software development process affect your organization. That’s why today we’re going to take a look at the importance of each of the major software development disciplines in terms of business outcomes.

Configuration Management

Configuration management is the practice of identifying, tracking, and controlling how your organization’s IT resources are set up and how different components relate to one another, with the goal of optimizing them for your organization’s needs.

Effective configuration management provides:

Performance

Proper configuration management improves the flow of data from one system to another, enabling greater efficiency throughout the whole organization. It’s what keeps your IT ecosystem functioning seamlessly at all times so your software tools are always operating at peak performance levels.

Compliance

Effective configuration management is also crucial for maintaining consistency between different software systems — ensuring they’re all compliant with your industry’s applicable guidelines and regulations. That means protecting your company from data breaches and worse.

Cost Reduction Better configuration management means less downtime and less system maintenance, which translates to resources saved. And since configuration management aids compliance as well, you also reduce the risk of expensive legal penalties.

Infrastructure

Your organization’s IT infrastructure is the array of technology it relies on to manage data and information. (Infrastructure refers to the types of technology components your business uses to process information, like software, servers, computers, and network switches, whereas configuration management refers to how those components are organized and how they interact.)

Effective infrastructure is vital to business success in a few different contexts:

Productivity

An optimized infrastructure helps streamline workflows across every department. Many companies now use cloud-based services that are more efficient than traditional infrastructure like physical servers. An example of an important part of your organization’s IT infrastructure is your communication technology, which is essential for enabling productivity among your employees.

Revenue

When your software infrastructure is unreliable or inefficient, it’s hard to provide great service to clients. Optimizing your software infrastructure not only makes more productive employees but also ensures they have the tools they need to give clients a good experience — and nothing drives revenue like happy clients.

Maintenance

Optimizing your software infrastructure makes maintenance much easier. Poorly optimized infrastructures can require an enormous amount of time and resources to maintain because they’ll need to be added to or rebuilt entirely as your business grows.

Frameworks

A framework is like a toolbox that makes it easier for developers to build large, complex software systems. Different frameworks include different sets of tools and are suited for different kinds of software. For example, one framework might provide an adequate foundation for mobile development, while another might be better for web development. The frameworks your software systems are built with have a major impact on multiple business factors, including:

Efficiency

Working within the right framework can shorten development time considerably. If the development team is using a framework that’s well-suited to the project, they can take advantage of tools and processes that will make it easier to build the software. However, a poorly-chosen framework that isn’t flexible enough to support the task at hand can be like driving a nail with a screwdriver - it just doesn’t work.

Reliability

An effective framework ensures more consistent code, better functionality, and better security throughout the project. Working with a clearly defined toolbox and set of parameters helps developers produce a final product that’s stable and cohesive. This prevents time wasted on debugging in the future.

Scalability

Different frameworks have different scalability potentials. The right framework can empower your organization for growth by making it easy to factor future scaling needs right into the blueprint — the wrong framework can result in software that can’t keep up with your business’s needs as it expands.

Security

Your cybersecurity systems are responsible for protecting your organization from threats like malware and data theft. Some companies neglect cybersecurity, but security should be prioritized both as a critical component of your organization as a whole and as a feature within each individual IT element. The best kind of IT security solution is a comprehensive one that’s designed to protect your business against a wide variety of threats. Cybersecurity has a significant impact in several areas of your business, such as:

Reputation

Security breaches involving sensitive customer data can spell disaster for your business’s reputation. An effective cybersecurity system is absolutely critical for protecting your organization from the public backlash data breaches create. Many companies take years to recover from cybersecurity scandals — and some never do.

Compliance

While every company is ultimately responsible for its own security, the law holds certain industries to strict cybersecurity requirements. Prioritizing cybersecurity within your software systems ensures you achieve compliance with any data protection laws that may apply to your organization.

Operations

Effective cybersecurity ensures the day-to-day operation of your company isn’t bogged down by viruses. When employees aren’t able to safely access the software tools they need, productivity grinds to a halt. For example, if your website or an essential piece of software goes down due to a virus, your organization could miss out on a lot of potential revenue-generating activities. Data lost due to a security breach can also take significant time and effort to recover, leading to an even greater loss of productivity and revenue.

Comprehensive Nearshore Software Development Services

Many Software development companies specialize in only one of these aspects of software development — however, each one is an equally important consideration. Traditionally, businesses seeking to outsource custom software development are forced to get each of these services from different vendors. This creates a disorganized and often very expensive development process that is not in the best interests of your business.

A comprehensive software development service company like KNDCODE provides a better approach to custom software development. KNDCODE doesn’t just handle one or two areas of development or one specific kind of software — we partner with you for the entire development process to build every aspect of the software and ensure support and maintenance are handled properly.

KNDCODE is a nearshore software development company, which means we’re based within the U.S., with experienced developers in the US and Central America. Nearshoring ensures you get the absolute best in terms of price, quality, and turnaround time without the challenges of communicating with developers based in vastly different time zones.

KNDCODE, Always Ahead, Forward, Near.