Setting budgets for software development initiatives is notoriously challenging and often leads to significant gaps between initial expectations and projected estimates. Project owners frequently assess budgets based solely on the coding of new features. However, focusing purely on lines of code or functionality ignores the critical activities surrounding and supporting a digital product's successful delivery.
A software development project encompasses various tasks beyond coding, from planning and discovery to infrastructure setup, iteration, and post-launch support. Though less “visible,” these activities consume significant time, resources, and effort and are just as essential to the project's success.
Breaking down the overlooked components of the software development lifecycle reveals how much more goes into delivering a functional, scalable, and impactful digital product or mobile app. Understanding these hidden layers is key to setting realistic budgets and aligning expectations on the total cost of any development project.
Administration: The Glue Holding Projects Together
Much of the project time is spent on administrative activities essential for coordination and progress tracking. These activities include scheduling, attending meetings, conducting product management tasks, tracking progress, and hosting reviews. For instance, daily standups, sprint planning sessions, stakeholder check-ins, and retrospectives are routine practices in most development teams.
While pivotal for ensuring alignment, resolving conflicts, and driving the project forward, administrative tasks are often undervalued. They can account for a significant portion of the overall project effort, and failing to account for them when planning the project budget can result in an inaccurate expectation of the overall cost.
Discovery: The Effort Before the First Line of Code
This crucial phase establishes a comprehensive product strategy before development begins, setting the foundation for success. Discovery involves clearly defining opportunities, exploring solutions to business challenges, and aligning the vision with long-term goals. Through market and user research, teams evaluate trends, analyze competitors, and identify unmet user needs, creating a roadmap for success. Detailed workflows and features are mapped out to prioritize MVP elements, ensuring the product is focused, impactful, and customer-centric.
This stage also involves making critical architectural and technology decisions and selecting tools and systems that align with the product’s scalability, integrations, and performance needs. To validate the vision and reduce risks, teams may develop proof of concepts and prototypes, testing key workflows and features to refine ideas before coding. By conducting a robust product strategy and discovery, businesses can ensure their project is well-planned and positioned for long-term growth and effectiveness.
Preparation: Building the Launchpad for Success
Preparation includes setting up development environments, configuring infrastructure, installing services, managing dependencies, and aligning technical tooling. These tasks ensure the team can execute efficiently during development. For example, creating continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, configuring servers, and establishing testing environments might not result in direct product features, but they provide the stability needed to build, test, and deploy your solution.
Execution: Turning Ideas into Tangible Assets
The execution phase is the most visible aspect of software development. It encompasses coding, designing, building the product, and writing documentation. Stakeholders typically envision this phase when assessing the total budget they can allocate to a software development project. Even in this phase, the required effort is often underestimated. Critical features such as handling edge cases, optimizing performance, and ensuring usability are frequently unaccounted for but are essential for delivering a polished and functional product.
Iteration: Crafting Perfection Through Continuous Improvement
Software engineering is inherently iterative. Beyond the initial execution, teams must continuously refine and improve the product. This involves debugging, refactoring code, enhancing tools to improve efficiency, and addressing issues that arise during development. Iteration often reveals hidden challenges like code inefficiencies or user experience flaws. Resolving these discoveries requires additional time and effort, further expanding project timelines.
Changes: Adapting to a Moving Target
No software project remains static. As development progresses, scope changes, omissions, and “nice-to-haves” inevitably emerge. Stakeholders may request new features, integrations, or adjustments based on evolving requirements or business priorities. This phenomenon, often called scope creep, is a common challenge in development projects. Without sufficient contingency planning, these changes can derail timelines and budgets. Accommodating scope changes usually requires reprioritization and additional resources beyond the initial budget planning.
Issues: Navigating the Unpredictable
Software development is inevitably fraught with unexpected issues. These surprises include technical debt, legacy system challenges, missing documentation, or unforeseen dependencies. For example, integrating with an outdated third-party system may reveal compatibility issues that require extensive rework. Resolving these unanticipated problems takes time and effort, adding to project costs. Since many of these risks are not fully known at the outset, they are rarely factored in when allocating a budget.
Support: Sustaining the Vision Beyond Launch Day
Even after the project is delivered, the work doesn’t end. Post-launch support includes addressing user feedback, fixing bugs, monitoring performance, and providing updates to ensure the product remains stable and functional. These support activities extend beyond the launch and require dedicated resources to maintain the product’s quality. This often leads to stakeholders focusing solely on creating a finite budget to launch the desired functionality without considering how to support it, as ongoing costs are frequently overlooked in budget forecasts.
Software Engineering is Not a Commodity
A common mistake companies make when evaluating software engineering companies is viewing the process as a simple transaction, focusing solely on the final features delivered, and comparing providers based on price. This approach reduces software engineering to a commodity, ignoring the vast differences in quality, process, and expertise that separate high-performing teams from average ones.
Successful software development isn’t just about delivering features. It’s about creating reliable, scalable, and user-friendly solutions that align with a company’s long-term goals. The price of a project may seem like the easiest metric to compare, but it rarely tells the whole story. Development teams focusing solely on delivering features at the lowest cost often cut corners, overlook crucial details, or fail to account for risks and future scalability. These shortcomings can lead to costly failures, technical debt, or a product that falls short of expectations.
Evaluating a software development company requires a deeper understanding of their value from a problem-solving approach, the ability to anticipate and mitigate risks, and a commitment to delivering quality throughout the software development lifecycle. Teams that excel in these areas prove their worth by delivering results that stand the test of time.