kotiq-blog1

[kotiq-blog1]

10 tips on how to choose the right software company

There is a vast of software development companies to choose from, when you come to the point where you want do develop something of your own.

But there are some points, you can go through eventually to see, if what you have chosen to work with is the best option in your case.

Here we go:

1. LANGUAGE BARRIER – GOOD ENGLISH IS HARD TO FIND ON SOME PARTS OF THE WORLD

Most likely, all companies will try to assure you their software development team are flawless in English, that can prove to be far from reality if you start to look beyond the team leads or senior developers.

The best way of checking what you are dealing with is to ask the company to arrange phone or Skype call with some members of the team you are going to work with.

Lost in translation is not what you want, as it can lead to misunderstandings, while misunderstandings lead to wrong implementations, extra expenses and prolonged deadlines.

2. CULTURAL FIT

This could be the biggest pain when hiring an off-shore company. Big cultural differences can lead to communication issues.

Similar mindset means you don’t have to focus you thoughts on how to speak with the other person “correctly”. You can focus on things that are important to you and have a straight language.

CONTINUE READING

[kotiq-blog1]

Software development life-cycle (SDLC)

SDLC – Software Development Life Cycle is a process used by software industry to analyse, develop and test the software. The goal of SDLC is to organize the core processes of the software development process, so that the final result gains the maximum quality it can get in the given situation (combination of the conditions, such as: available budget, knowledge-base over the business cases of the software, development time limitations, professional level of the software architects and engineers involved into the process).

DID YOU KNOW?

SDLC is the acronym of Software Development Life Cycle.

It is also called as Software development process.

SDLC is nothing but a framework defining tasks to be performed in each software development phase

WHAT DOES SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYSLE (SDLC) CONSIST OF?

1. REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS

The requirement analysis stage is the most important in SDLC. It is usually performed by the senior members of the software development team, marketing and industry experts. This is the crucial part of the project where the software development team leadership must understand the essence of the software to be developed, the specifics of the business cases and the potential prevalence of the software being development over the products of competitors, assuming they exist in the market.

At this stage also the identification of the risks takes place as well as quality assurance methodology baseline is settled down.

The outcome of the analysis stage is to define potential technical solutions which may lead to the success with minimum risk.

2. DESIGN

In our simplified model, we assume that after the stage 1. Requirement analysis, the leadership of the project writes down the decisions that were taken and develop the so called Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document. The SRS is the reference for the software architects to deliver the best possible architecture for the given software.

The outcome of the work of software architect(s) is Design Document Specification (DDS). The best scenario is that DDS is then reviewed by the important stakeholders of the project from different facets, such as: risk assessment, product robustness, design modularity, budget and time constraints. The best design model is then discussed and selected for the product.

The design of the software clearly defines the architectural modules of the product as well as data flow and communication diagrams within the product itself, as well as between the product and 3rd party systems, it might integrate with.

CONTINUE READING

[kotiq-blog1]

How do I know if I need to build my own software?

When running a business in a modern world, sooner or later you most probably will face the situation where you need a software to process one or another task faster/easier than it is by doing it manually.

We can take one of the most widespread issue solving software choices across the modern businesses – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, for example.

Let’s not rise and try to answer the question why you need it in this topic, as if you are here, you already know you need it. You just are in the front of a very challenging question: Do I need to build my own custom software or I could go on with some ready solution?

Canned software

As for the start, you will most likely lean towards the decision to buy some off-the-shelf software. By staying on the same CRM topic, it might be SugarCRM or Vtiger, let’s say. Without any means of promoting these two products, I must say, whenever you hear some business wondering about what CRM to choose, these are the first to candidates on the table.

And no doubt – these products have proven themselves to be good enough for most of the situations and canned software like this may save you a lot of precious golden coins!

Buy installing the ready-to-go software you’ll get the basic customer management tools right away. Some plugins providing integration with the Asterisk VoIP server are also couple of clicks away.

Soon you will find out that with some little extra effort you can customize the data you want to store in your customer database too, so it is all quite handy and well performing.

So, why should I consider investing into custom software?

Custom software, in essence, can give benefits to your business if:

CONTINUE READING