The efficiency and effectiveness of web application designing and development company

Software has become critical for most large enterprises. They should adopt a reliable output metric that is integrated with the process for gathering application requirements.

Most large companies invest heavily in application development, and they do so for a compelling reason:  Yet in our experience, few organizations have a viable means of measuring the output of their application-development projects. Instead, they rely on input-based metrics, such as the hourly cost of developers, variance to budget, or percent of delivery dates achieved. Although these metrics are useful because they indicate the level of effort that goes into web application development, these metrics do not truly answer the question: how much software functionality did a team deliver in a given time period? Or, put another way, how productive was the application-development group?

Flying blind

With big money and possibly the company’s competitiveness at stake, why does much software-development company fly blind without a metric in place to measure productivity?

First, with every metric comes some level of overhead to calculate and track that metric. With some metrics, the overhead has proved larger than the benefits afforded by them. The second reason is that in many application-development organizations there is a lack of standardized practices for calculating metrics. For example, it is difficult to deploy output measurements if application teams are following different approaches to capturing functional and technical requirements for their projects. Finally, and perhaps most important, there is often a certain amount of resistance from application developers themselves. Highly skilled IT professionals do not necessarily enjoy being measured or held accountable to productivity metric, especially if they feel that the metric does not equitably take into account relevant differences among development projects. As a result, many organizations believe there is no viable productivity metric that can address all of these objections.

Use cases

In addition to lacking a viable methodology for measuring productivity, organizations often don’t have a robust way to gather and organize functional and technical requirements for application-development projects. Instead, they list requirements in what often amounts to little more than a loosely structured laundry list. Organizations may have used this laundry-list approach over a long period of time, and it thus may be deeply entrenched.

As a result, these organizations find it difficult to fully and accurately capture requirements and align them with the needs of their internal or external business clients. Their application-development projects tend to suffer the inefficiencies of shifting priorities, last-minute change requests, and dissatisfied business users. We believe use cases provide a logical and structured way to organize the functional requirements of an application-development project. Each use case is a description of a scenario under which the user of an application interacts with that application.

By focusing first on business objectives and the functional requirements of applications rather than on the technical requirements, both business leaders and web Development Company find easy to understand. This structure expedites the requirements-gathering phase of the software-development life cycle. It also lowers the risk of failing to incorporate the functionality required by the business and thereby reduces the amount of costly change requests and rework during the subsequent design and build phases.