As in project management, there are always competing priorities in software development. And a team inevitably finds itself having to make compromises to find the delicate balance between these priorities and constraints. And rarely, if ever, do they succeed in reconciling them successfully and adequately.

However, in today’s modern software world, this notion of compromise is no longer acceptable. Even “better, cheaper, and faster” is no longer good enough. Today’s customers want top quality, regular updates, and a competitive price, and sometimes, their demands go much further. Successful software development now requires adding far more value. Software vendors’ products and services must meet an ever-increasing set of criteria with no room for compromise.

As technological infrastructure costs have fallen, higher performance storage, memory, and processors are now available to all developers at a more affordable price. At the same time, software development tools and methods have undergone exciting changes, with open source and low-cost tools being far more widely available.

Now, a single engineer can deploy a web application that supports auto-scaling, consisting of a message queue and a database, all in just minutes, matching the same results that used to take the entire team days or weeks. By using a highly scalable and available cloud infrastructure, the cost of hosting an application is a fraction of what it was just a decade ago.

All of these factors have combined to make the software development scene far more competitive, which makes following the principles of sound software engineering all the more critical. In this article, we’ll lay some of the essential ones down.

1. Timeliness

You must deliver value to customers faster than your competitors while anticipating their growing expectations and ever-changing demands.

2. Adaptability

Vendors need to produce software that can adapt to ever-changing market conditions. Businesses need their software to adapt and deal with various abnormal market conditions in a world of supply chain constraints, tariffs, and unstable energy prices. They are long gone the days of rigid software design following pre-set formulae.

3. Maintainability

If you want to earn long-term clients, you need to pay attention to maintainability. Technological advances have yet to overcome an inconvenient truth: 75% of software costs are related to maintenance and administration issues. Software design must contribute to the simplification and optimization of maintenance processes.

4. Automation

When it comes to development, it is essential to leverage automation tools and methods for the design and deployment phases and to limit the slowdowns caused when processes rely on manual tasks. As the demand for skilled developers grows, the cost of developers’ time increases. You don’t want your developers to spend hours doing unproductive tasks. Automation is an essential tool to help make your team more competitive.

5. Scalability

Scalability must be at the heart of the software architecture. To truly reach scalability, the software you design must be genuinely open to allow for growth from 20 to 20,000 and from 20,000 to 20 million users without having to touch the underlying software architecture or, worse yet, force the customer into a situation where the product must be replaced entirely.

But scalability isn’t just about the number of users: it’s also about the volume of data, the complexity of the application, and the number of developers that can concurrently work on the project.

6. Measurability

Software should measure and provide key metrics, reports, and business outcomes that DevOps, site reliability engineers (SREs), and business teams can leverage to improve business performance and success.

7. Resilience

In the event of a problem, a well-engineered software program must be able to recover its operation, quickly restore lost functionality, or prevent data loss to ensure that it does not negatively impact the business and customer experience. Regular backups, trace logs, and error handling play vital roles here.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is not a matter of meeting some of the criteria here. If you want to be successful, It is imperative to meet all of them. Otherwise, a competition that provides excellent product engineering services will take care of it.