ERP, OpenERP, ruby on rails, crm, web development

CEO Speak

The Economics of Software Development

Software Development has always been challenging as it involves several pitfalls right from requirement gathering, communication between customer and provider, Software Development Life-cycle. There has always been a gap between expectation of the customer and delivered product. So essentially it is a very risky venture for both customers and providers. The best way to tackle is to have good management in place so that these issues are covered.

Firstly, I would like to speak about satisfying customers. It has always been difficult for providers to satisfy their customers. There are number of existing off the shelf products available but none of them will fit the customers. So a key element of making client happy is to tailor the product to fit them instead of just having a generic version.

Project management, version control tools are a must in today's software development as we have large teams working collaboratively from different locations. Without such tools it would be difficult to manage the code. Communication has always been a problem specially working in an offshore environment,. In most cases the customer never sees the provider. In such environment reporting is key. Daily or at least once a week reporting is important to make sure things are on track.

Open source products provides a great platform to build on customized solutions for customers. For example if you are looking for a CRM, instead of building it from scratch an existing open source project could be used and the customer specific requirements can be customized. Also several of these products have no license fees.

Cost has always been an important factor for customer while making a decision on the product to choose. Open source tools cost less compared to proprietary solutions. In some cases there is no licensing fees involved. Not all open source projects are good unless they are backed by a good support.

Software Development Methodology is an making or breaking a project. Gone are the days when software was developed in the waterfall model. In the era where the business have to adapt themselves to changing environment of the market. To meet the changing business requirement agile methodology is a perfect fit. The customer gives only a brief overview of what he wants and the software is developed in collaboration with client. Testing which is often overlook is a critical piece to making agile development work.

To conclude, Pragmatic culture lies in line with the product we are using i.e open culture, exhilarating work environment and good moral values. All our customers enjoy and have good relationship that drives our business and add values to our bottom lines.