Software Deployment — What are the Major Obstacles?

Software development & deployment can seem like an overwhelming task. There are many ways to develop & deploy software, and each choice has its pros and cons that you must weigh before deciding which one to use. Businesses today are more reliant on software than ever before.

Every day, countless lines of code get written, and thousands of new software applications get deployed across a global network. As per Failory, 4000+ apps are released worldwide daily.

Most teams follow an iterative, agile development process to keep up with changing business needs.

• But is your development & deployment strategy keeping pace?
• Do you know how software gets developed?
• What are the bottlenecks of software deployment?

This article answers these questions effectively. Let’s begin with the first query.

How is Software Developed?

Software development is a process that usually takes several steps to get from idea to final product. There are multiple ways to categorize these different steps in the software development process. Still, one of the most common in today’s industry is the six stages model of the software development life cycle.

Idea or Discovery Phase- The first step in software development, whether for a mobile app or a web platform, is the discovery or the idea phase. It’s usually pretty informal and involves brainstorming with stakeholders, researching similar projects, and keeping an eye on competitors.

The focus is to get everyone on board and ensure you have all relevant information before moving forward. Be sure to get buy-in from critical players during discovery because their involvement will continue throughout other stages — and if they bail during later phases, it could derail your project.

Requirement Analysis Phase- In this stage, you gather all of your stakeholders, write out what’s necessary from each stakeholder, and add anything else mentioned. This step is vital as it ensures that you have all requirements from all stakeholders before beginning the designing phase. The goal here is to have a list of written requirements and nothing more.

When deciding on an idea or creating something new, please focus on the user’s problem or pain points rather than making more complex solutions unless it’s indispensable. If you’re too focused on fixing one problem (your own), your product might miss addressing other more important issues.

You can continuously iterate on future releases of your product! Plan by defining some high-level goals, and then make some medium-level goals based on those higher-level ones. Finally, detail out some low-level goals (more like tasks) for each part of your app or site design flow — you can use these as guidelines for building features at each step along the way.

Design Phase- Once you’ve made your big picture plan, it’s time to get creative. It is where you break down your software into smaller parts and start working out how you will put those together. For example, if your software handles customer orders, you might need to consider how that will work.

It’s here that decisions get done about exactly what features & each part of your program or system will have. It can also include deciding whether many elements do not work so well in testing and need improvement.

Designing also includes creating any necessary documentation for users who may want to know more about how things work or use it themselves if they’re going to do that instead.

Implementation Phase: One of the essential aspects of your development lifecycle is implementing your solution. You have to code it!

This part is all about putting together your team, building your product, hiring Developers, and setting up for success. It involves getting programmers and designers involved & also figuring out how you plan to sell and distribute.

You can spend weeks or months in implementation; often, however, you’ll keep moving back and forth between stages — that’s why they’re called stages.

Testing & Quality Assurance Phase: After you’ve coded, you need to test it, and it involves running both manual and automated tests on your program. No matter how thoroughly you’ve thought through your requirements, there are usually surprises that come up in testing, so be sure to give yourself enough time for testing before launch.

Source: Statista- Major Testing Tools

Quality assurance is one of those things that most software companies pay lip service to, but not many do. It’s difficult for most companies to implement and requires a lot of effort and human resources (and money!) to set up and keep running.

Unfortunately, even with all that, you’re still not guaranteed quality — you know you’ll be able to detect quality issues down the line. Small businesses need to do what they can to maintain quality at every step in their software development life cycle to stay ahead in today’s competitive market.

Whether working with an external QA company or putting together your internal process, every business needs some QA strategy.

Deployment Phase: Once you’ve created your software, it’s time to deploy it. Deployment refers to delivering your finished product into production. This stage is generally overseen by quality assurance (QA) and software developers.

Your QA team will ensure that all features are working as expected and that the system is stable before you put it live for users to use. Deployment can be tricky; if something goes wrong, you could lose all your data or create problems with other programs on your server.

You can proceed with two things: first, write comprehensive tests that cover all possible cases, so you know exactly how each new change will impact others, and second, conduct performance tests with real-world data before sending them into production for everyday use by customers.

Here are the top challenges faced while going live with the software

Data Classification Issues

Data classification is one area where many enterprise software deployment projects run into problems. Classifying data is about determining whether a piece of information is, for example, personal or financial.

It’s not just a matter of determining that sensitive data needs special consideration differently than non-sensitive data — classification also often determines how much security should be applied to protect said data.

Source: Grand View Research

Once classifications are determined, enterprise software deployments get planned around putting systems in place to secure them properly. For instance, you can set up encryption systems or access control procedures based on what type of data has been classified as needing protection.

Integration Challenges

Creating global supply chain visibility helps to ensure that you integrate any newly added systems with your current ones quickly and seamlessly. When it comes to installation, planning is critical.

It would be best to have a clear roadmap for how all of your software systems will play together. There are lots of ways to approach integration challenges during software deployment, but you should think about managing them in four parts:

• Gathering resources (people, knowledge, etc.),
• Planning (identifying potential hazards, aligning teams),
• Implementing (determining best practices), and
• Evaluating (monitoring project performance).

These steps can apply to any software rollout; figuring out which one or two you need most depends mainly on where your focus lies. To identify which element(s) deserve extra attention, start by breaking down each stage into sub-tasks, then prioritize what needs more support based on importance or riskiness.

1. Poor Planning

One of many reasons software deployment is such a pain point is that it rarely has a good planning team. Many companies and organizations underestimate how much time and effort goes into planning deployment, from defining processes to getting management buy-in to determining whether you have sufficient bandwidth.

Even if you have a sound plan in place, research as per Failory has shown that 63% of all software projects fail due to poor planning. To successfully deploy your applications at scale, you need a solid plan covering everything from training staff on new tools to set expectations with managers.

You also need to analyze & determine what success looks like; having end goals will help motivate team members through difficult times. Overall, you want to make sure that everyone involved understands how critical they play their part. If one piece of your deployment puzzle fails, every single component could suffer as a result.

2. Failing to Account for Hidden Costs

You don’t need to read about hidden costs during software deployment. When it comes to implementing new systems, you can almost always expect some expense.

Even with system upgrades, there are times when vendors will bundle more into your purchase than you need; that leaves you with decisions to make after installation, like whether or not you should pay for extra features that were free during deployment.

Most people won’t even consider hidden costs until they’re staring down an invoice of thousands of dollars they hadn’t anticipated. However, if you have an eye out for what you want versus what may have been free, software deployment can stay on track without getting derailed by financial surprises.

Hire Software Developers who give you accurate estimates of the project development cost.

3. Resistance to Change

When it comes to deploying software, resistance is futile! Resistance occurs for any number of reasons — technology change usually includes some organizational changes as well, but these can often get overlooked during implementation.

This is why there are several obstacles in software deployment that you should consider before moving forward with an upgrade or an implementation project.

• People are urged to avoid changing one’s usual way of doing things, especially when change may be beneficial.
• Employees suffer from passive-aggressive tendencies. It involves doing nothing about something which needs to be done out of reluctance to adjust.
• The unwillingness or inability to change even when everyone agrees that something needs to be changed or improved.
• Fear or resistance towards technology, in general, is often why some companies resist upgrades or new software implementations even if they are beneficial.

They are afraid that there may be too much change at once, which they are not prepared for. When thinking about software deployment, you need to determine when change may become necessary to address these concerns.

Source: Statista

When changes are required, implement them in small increments, which allow your team time to learn and adjust with little stress on them or their roles within your organization.

You can resolve these issues by adopting a formal deployment process that will give you insight into when to initiate change, what needs to be changed and how to go about it effectively.

Dynamic Changes in the IT Infrastructure

Because software deployment involves adding applications to an existing IT infrastructure, there can be many changes in all aspects of that environment. Changes might include hardware upgrades, new application servers, or an upgrade in bandwidth or Internet connection speeds.

For performing a successful software deployment, it’s important to anticipate any changes that may occur beforehand and factor them into your deployment schedule. An excellent way to avoid any problems is to plan, know how much time will be necessary for each task involved in the deployment process, and always allow room for error when calculating time estimates.

For example, if you think it will take two hours to load up a new server with data, set aside one hour extra just in case things don’t go according to plan.

Wrapping Up

No businesses are exactly alike, and therefore there is no one-size-fits-all solution to software deployment. To ensure your business is up and running efficiently, you need to find a way to meet your goals for deployment.

While it may seem like an implausible task, answering questions about goals and challenges will help identify what’s holding you back. From there, developing actionable solutions can help ease that pain point — and finally, get things rolling in your favor via a Software Development Company.

FAQs

Question: What are the top three Software Development Life Cycle Models?

Answer: As per Statista, the top 3 SDLC models include the following:

• DevOps Model: DevOps is an approach that aims to minimize risk, increase product value, and shorten development cycles. Like other project management methods, DevOps includes five stages: Planning, Implementation or Build Phase (Dev), Testing (QA), Production Operations (Sysops), and Continuous Improvement.

The significant difference between traditional project management and DevOps is in its priority of people over processes. By focusing on collaboration instead of workflow automation, DevOps enables engineering teams to respond quickly to changing business demands by building software with agile methodologies.

• Agile Model: Agile software development is an incremental approach to software development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. It encourages rapid & flexible responses to change.

In an agile project management framework, timeboxed iterations called sprints get used to revising work based on feedback from stakeholders. The emphasis is on high-quality code and testing, working software (and not documentation), and providing comprehensive user feedback as early as possible to ensure that they are identified and get addressed early.

• Waterfall Model: It is an approach to sequential software development. Under Waterfall, each stage runs sequentially and must be completed before moving on to more advanced settings.

It’s essentially cradle-to-grave management of a project, and it can be efficient if there aren’t many changes along the way. The idea behind Waterfall is that projects need to move forward in progressive phases without disruption or delay as teams work through each stage until they reach completion.

Question: What is the most crucial step for software development?

Answer: There are many different stages involved in developing software. Although you could create an entire business process around each step, some steps are more crucial than others.

The most crucial step in your development cycle is to make sure that everything works before you decide to launch it into production. It is called testing or bug-fixing, and there are several different types of testing that developers use.

Another crucial point is ensuring that all bugs get squashed before you launch new versions of your software — this can be tricky if you have multiple people working on fixing bugs at once, so having good communication with them can help. Last but not least, it’s essential to know when to stop coding features and go live with your product/service!

Question: What are software deployment tools?

Answer: If you’re starting, you might not have enough capital to invest in expensive hardware that will be obsolete in two years. That’s where software deployment tools come into play. Think of them as virtual machines that get deployed on computers with far less processing power than would typically be required to run an operating system or application suite.

It allows IT, professionals, to test the software before rolling it out into production cost-effectively — and once they do roll it out, they can always roll back if something goes wrong.

Question: How do I develop a good software deployment plan?

Answer: If you are writing code, there are six stages in the software development life cycle. If you do not follow these stages, your project may fail to develop correctly or at all. How do I create a good software deployment plan? Deployment is where you get your newly developed software into actual use by real customers.

You must do sufficient work in all six steps before deploying because each step needs to be thoroughly tested and verified before moving on to deployment. Suppose testing or verification indicates that any requirements need to be changed. In that case, your project will require further refinement, which means either more time has passed since the completion of prior steps or parts of earlier work has been discarded.