3 Key Contributors to Software Development’s Demand for Speed
Sure, product quality is essential, but speed might be even more important in our agile world. The amount of pressure that IT organizations are under to accelerate product delivery continues to increase each and every year, and while development has always felt like a race against time, we’ve entered a new, even faster phase.
Why, though? That’s a question we don’t often ask enough. We throw around terms like “agile” or “DevOps” and consider that a good enough answer for the demand for speed, but there are three major factors outlined by Mark Levy, the director of strategy at Micro Focus, that call for greater development speed.
- First, Levy points to the customer. Your users feel more empowered and savvy than ever, and with the adoption of consumer technologies that are intuitive and poweful, they won’t settle for anything below their expectations. Because of this, new software has to arrive faster and faster to keep up with what people expect.
- Next, it’s important to keep pace with your competitors, who also feel the need to deliver software faster for their own users. As Levy notes, “Firms that use software to disrupt established markets can move faster than traditional hardware or people-based businesses. Battles are already being waged across many industries between incumbents and software-powered companies.” Because of this, developers need to innovate, and they need to innovate fast.
- Lastly, it’s important to note that in most ways, software success runs parallel to business success. Businesses need to evolve year over year, so the digital products and services associated with it must follow suit. That means development teams need to speed things up to support the growth of the overall business.
Of course, if you can’t match quality with your increased speed, the process falls apart. But according to Levy, you shouldn’t have to choose just speed or just quality when it comes to modern software—both are simultaneously achievable.
“As far as the ‘speed vs. quality’ trade-off, with modern software practices, you should not have to make a choice,” he explained to StickyMinds. “By automating and building quality into your development and delivery process and ‘shifting left’ your testing, speed increases and quality improves. DevOps has proven that speed and quality are not mutually exclusive.”
Your software development should be fast. It should also be consistently good. But maybe most importantly, your product should not only meet customer expectations, but exceed them.
