The hiring process for software engineers is complex and time-consuming. At the end of it, your company has a new hire with high salary expectations who might take several months to reach full productivity. You could spend many hours and thousands of dollars for each addition to your team, only to find they’re a bad fit — or even that they want to move roles again.
Roadmaps are crucial to the success of digital transformation projects. But they’re misunderstood, and often misapplied. In many cases, companies don’t have a roadmap at all! Where they do, it’s often not doing what it should for them.
Agile principles emphasize the use of relatively short development cycles, each of which achieves some tangible improvement to the software. Agile rapidly became the dominant approach to software development because using it means you catch bugs early, before you built too much on top of them, and because it gives you granular control over development direction. Yet, when it comes to UX, agile is underutilized. That’s because too many software development companies see UX as something separate from their main task.
Cloud migration involves moving data, applications and processes to the cloud. This can be from on-site implementations like owned servers, or from another cloud host. Moving to the cloud can be daunting, especially if you haven’t made the transition before. Even if you’re familiar with cloud computing, planning and executing a migration still requires forethought and strategic, as well as technical, consideration.
When should you outsource software and app design? For some companies, the answer is ‘never’ — but they’re pretty rare. Many companies rely to some extent on outsourcing, to get them over a hump, or to accelerate time to market without taking on the liabilities involved with a big full-time team.
Several technologies that are coming to the fore in commercial applications will change the way we develop software, and the uses to which it can be put. While some of these technologies are still at the unstable innovation stage, where it’s unclear whether they have a future or what it will involve, others are making the leap from niche uses and early adoption to the mainstream.
