Four easy ways to keep your software developers happy

Software development can feel pretty intimidating to the layman. Often, it can seem hard to know how you should communicate your requirements and issues when working on your software project. 

It’s important to ensure you’re not wasting your time and money when working with your programmers, so we’ve put together a list of four great tips to keep your software developers happy.

1. Keep it specific and clear

Receiving vague requests and feedback during development and testing of a software project can make solving issues tricky. Feedback like “The website is broken” or “Feature X doesn’t work” doesn’t give your developers a clear problem to solve.

When you’re reporting issues or errors, try to provide specific details. Where possible, outline the objective you’re trying to address with the changes or feedback, and provide examples of the issue and steps to recreate the problem. Including details as to why the issue is a problem, in relation to the project, is also a great way to help your developers craft better solutions to bugs.

2. Make sure you know the difference between a new feature, improvement and a bug

Testing is an important part of any software project, but when it comes to giving feedback, it can often feel tempting to log everything as a bug.

To ensure your project is delivered on time and to budget, it is important to clearly differentiate between bugs and new feature requests so your software development team can assess each task and allocate project resources accordingly.

3. Ship early and squash scope creep

Programming can be quite complicated and a clear scope is critical to setting realistic budgets and timeframes for your software project. It’s much easier, and cheaper, to add and remove features before a single line of code has been written than after development is underway.

Spending time at the start of the project putting together a clear development brief and scope will go a long way to mitigate this issue.

4. Listen to your software developers – they have your best interests at heart

An important outcome from the scoping process is to identify the best tools and platform to suit the requirements of your software project.

There a lot of platforms and languages out there and a good software developer will help you choose the right platform for your needs and budget.

Sometimes you may have a prejudice towards or against a certain platform. It’s important to ensure your reasons for insisting on a specific platform or language are based on business goals.

Choosing the wrong platform can cost time and money and may even prevent your project from meeting its goals. Many software projects have suffered from a company insisting on using a specific platform for no other reason than “it’s what they know”.

Avoid making this mistake. Put aside your personal preferences and trust your developer’s experience. Work closely with key stakeholders and ensure everyone commits to the best platform for your project.

Find the perfect software development partner

Inoutput aren’t your usual developers. Find out how we make it easy for you to avoid the common pitfalls of software development and cut through the jargon. Give us a call on (03) 9016 3066 or send us details about your project via our contact form.