Developing secure and fully functional custom software solutions can be an excellent way to overcome many specific challenges your business faces. However, they’re designed to fulfill particular needs, meaning that packages, suites, and applications will likely take proportionate amounts of time to meet all the enterprise’s required standards.
With that in mind, there are many stages when it comes to the life cycle of a software’s development:
- Requirements and planning, which can take two weeks to a month
- Architecture and design, which usually takes around two weeks
- Coding and development, from three to nine months
- Implementation, two weeks to one month
- Maintenance and testing, three weeks to two months
- Production, a month or more
As you can see, the average time associated with custom software development usually takes four months to a year. However, keep in mind that it isn’t uncommon for projects to go beyond this timeframe.
The project scope will determine the time frame
It isn’t easy to measure how much time the custom software development requires because of the different requirements of specific projects. For example, some conditions might include the particular functionalities, APIs, modules, external libraries, and security features for software development for a large enterprise or a small one.
How the application must be implemented and integrated within existing systems can also affect its time frame. For example, if quality assurance testers find software flaws and bugs, remediation may take more time. Other considerations are the business logic’s complexity, database code’s migration, platform support, the scalability of the coding, and more.
Small-scale and large-scale projects
Custom software projects can generally be categorized into small-scale and large-scale projects. As their name suggests, the latter tends to be associated with more giant enterprises requiring more integrations, including database data migration, API programming, or legacy system remediation. Available integrations could be custom software linking with CMS applications, CRM suites, etc.
On the other hand, smaller-scale projects need less programming, integration, and QA testing and fewer modules. This is because of its more straightforward nature. That said, system integration and security concerns will generally be more significant with the bigger projects, leading to more extended time frames for adequate remediation.
Quicker isn’t always better
When deciding on the development process, coding language tends to be included in the discussion. However, an integral factor is a performance and scalability versus the speed of custom software. For example, scripting languages might be quicker to do than actual object-oriented languages like Java or C++, and enterprise solutions may require more robust languages for meeting their business objectives. Because of this, faster development times may not always be a better approach.
Conclusion
New applications, especially custom software, will take a while before their implementation can begin producing tangible results for a business. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give an exact time frame on when it’ll start showing results. It will depend on many factors, ranging from the project’s scale and scope to the development team. So keep these in mind if you’re looking to develop new software.
