Revealed: The Secret to Rapid and Predictable Software Development

Should You Build or Buy Your Next Software Application?

New technologies are accelerating the speed of change in industries and markets around the world. Companies large and small are using them to create a competitive advantage. A wide range of new technologies are leveling the playing field, enabling the Davids to conquer the Goliaths across many industries. The question you may be asking yourself, is “which technologies offer the ability to out innovate my competitors, to capture or maintain a market leading position?”.

Historically, when companies were considering how to innovate, they needed to face the age old question of “should we build our own solution from scratch, or buy an existing ‘off the shelf’ solution?”. Both approaches offer benefits and drawbacks worth considering, but now there is a new and better way to help your business create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Examining The Case for Buying:

For companies with simple, straightforward requirements, it’s likely that an existing software application can meet most of their needs. While it may not meet all their needs, it may be deemed good enough. In these situations, it’s reasonable that a company would choose an off the shelf software application. The price of the software would likely be known upfront, or could be easily obtained, making the cost side of the cost benefit analysis easier to derive.

But what if the software application doesn’t meet all of an organisation’s critical requirements? Will its customers have the same needs as those of other companies using the same application? Should that organisation reevaluate its priorities, or should they rule out buying an off the shelf software application? Off the shelf software applications force companies to consider what is really important for them. If too many compromises are made by choosing a prebuilt application, it may undermine the buyer’s ability to achieve their goals.

Despite being referred to as an off the shelf product, buying an existing enterprise software solution is never as simple as installing and starting to use it. Most enterprise software applications still require considerable configuration and customisation before they can be used.

For example, it’s typical for enterprise software deployments to take anywhere from 12 to 18 months. And in many cases, companies need to change their internal processes to adapt to how the software works.

Examining The Case for Building:

It can be very tempting for an organisation to build its own application, as a means to satisfy all its requirements. Although organisations think building their own application is their best option, to meet those requirements, these projects are fraught with risk. Anyone who has experienced a software project will know firsthand how risky and stressful it can be. More importantly, these projects to build software take longer than expected. They require internal approvals for business cases, budget approvals and resource identification and assignment before the actual software development work begins.

Once developed, internally developed applications can be challenging to maintain and update for a number of reasons. After a project ends, internal development teams are redeployed to other projects, or if external contractors were hired to do the development, those teams are let go at the conclusion of the project. This leaves the organisation unable to make critical updates and bug fixes needed to satisfy users and properly meet requirements to drive adoption.

A New Way:

The good news is that for ambitious and innovative organisations, both large and small, there’s now a new agile and systematic way to develop software. Low-code development platforms, such as the offered by market leader OutSystems, allow your organisation to create software applications using a graphical user interface (GUI) and configuring it, instead of coding it from scratch. One of the key benefits being that it accelerates the completion and delivery of software applications, reducing time, expense and complexity.

Low-code development platforms are quickly becoming an important tool for innovating faster, offering a great deal of flexibility. The strength of these tools relaxes the developer resource requirements for building amazing applications. It takes away much of the heavy lifting, enabling outstanding software developers to spend their time on the areas of delighting customers. Using low-code development, you can be successful with a less experienced team, and still achieve an excellent result with your application.

In an agile environment, low-code tools also enable the delivery of robust, secure code from the first version onwards. Purely from an engineering standpoint, every version of the code is “Production ready”.

Maintaining, iterating and improving your application with a low-code approach is not only possible, but is also cost effective. New resources (whether internally or externally sourced) can be added to projects, and can hit the ground running to make your required application changes. This enables you to continue to evolve your application, using low-code tools, to meet market needs. Once you see what’s possible, you’ll want to consider low-code application development for all of your software development projects.

Low-code development tools, like the one from OutSystems, can enable your organisation to create new applications on top of existing enterprise application systems. A common example is companies wanting to extend data from complex ERP systems to new users via mobile applications. While many traditional enterprise applications were not designed with flexibility and extensibility in mind, a low-code approach offers you the ability to innovate them despite this.

Discover What’s Possible for Your Organisation to Achieve:

Find out how using a low-code development platform from OutSystems could help your organisation create innovative applications. With nearly two decades helping organisations like yours, OutSystems has been acknowledged as a leader by Gartner, Ovum and Forrester.

Truewind is an award winning OutSystems development partner and a recognised innovator in low-code development. We have extensive low-code app development experience and have helped organisations like yours for over a decade.

If you can imagine it, Truewind can build it.

Download our e-book to discover more about Low code http://digital.truewind.pt/e-book-essential-guide-low-code

Contact us today at info@truewind.uk or +44 75 5351 0942 to find how we can help you.