5 Challenges Any Software Project Needs to Address

Software development is a complex process that can also be pretty unpredictable. You may face problems that need a quick fix, and it is next to impossible for programmers to be prepared for every single situation that may arise when building new solutions. 

Fortunately, some of these challenges tend to recur in different projects. This means your business just needs a little bit of knowledge and preparation to avoid the most common mistakes and work on new IT projects more effectively.

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5 Most Common Challenges in Software Development 

Today, software development is a key element in business process management, essential for the growth of businesses and organizations of practically any size. Mindful of the scale of the venture, this article aims to outline several of the most frequent challenges that often crop up in IT projects and that nearly every programmer will need to address at some point in their career. 

This article will help businesses prepare for these situations to prevent mistakes, avoid unnecessary frustration and always remain productive in their endeavors.

Have a look at this list of the five most typical software development challenges and ways to avoid them.

1. Not understanding project’s purpose
2. Unclear project communication
3. Issues with software integration
4. Problems with software quality
5. Technical debt

Challenge #1: Unclear Project Goals

Software is usually developed with a specific business goal in mind, e.g., to address clearly defined problems or future user needs. Problems may appear if the target group and the product’s market potential are not researched well enough before developers get to work. 

Without a thorough analysis, your business runs the risk of setting down inconsistent project requirements, and if you don’t understand your users, your products may fail to hit the target. 

Before you start out on any software project, take some time to answer the following questions: What problem do you want to solve? What are you doing? Why are you doing it? How are you doing it? 

Otherwise, you will soon stumble on risks caused by your ignorance. 

These risks may include:

• Little or no demand for your MVP in the target group;
• A limited project with limited functionalities;
• An unoriginal solution, too similar to competitor products;
• A lack of competitive advantage or a clear business model.

From the point of view of software development, if such risks materialize, you might have to make unplanned changes to the project, including its budget and schedule.

How to prepare for the challenge:

• A must: you need to perform an analysis of market standards, the market, and your competition, and a feasibility evaluation. In addition, you should define your personas and hold in-depth interviews focused on understanding the perspective of the end user.
• Nice to have: it is a good idea to analyze customer buying behavior, (long-term) profitability, conduct a product feasibility study, define the Business Model Canvas, and preliminarily adjust the product to the market.

Challenge # 2: Lack of Communication

Communication is the most important skill for any manager today. Without communication, you cannot manage people and software development. In projects that involve several dozen people divided into several teams (often distributed across different locations and even time zones), communication is vital for success and should take up to 10-15% of your teams’ working time.

Ineffective communication may generate issues; your teams may not understand the project's goal, repeatedly ask the same questions, duplicate work, or carry out incorrect implementations. All this will increase team frustration and, ultimately, slow down their progress or even bring it to a complete halt. Consequently, your business may fail to meet your commitments, struggle with project delays and redundancy programs. Experienced programmers also rarely want to work on badly managed projects. 

How to prepare for the challenge

• Trust is the foundation of communication and cooperation between teams: it should be taken care of from the get-go. Trust creates a space for honest and open conversations, especially if there are problems in the project.
• The next step is to draw up a communication plan, which should contain all the necessary information:
  • What communication channels will be used in your teams? What purpose should each serve?
  • When should we communicate in person? When is asynchronous communication enough?
  • Who is who in the project? Who is the manager? Who is part of the project team? Who are the stakeholders of the project?
  • How will we communicate important information, such as, e.g., project status updates? How often will it be shared?

Challenge # 3: Software Integration

Integration is one of the most important phases of software development. Most hidden bugs come to light at this stage of the project. Statistics show that as much as 70% of system integrations fail to meet the targets, which is a real challenge for IT teams.

The best way to address software integration is to rely on network services. In order to achieve integration and data flow between platforms, flexible network services must support SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer) protocol standards. A correct integration should enable you to move from file-based integration to network services integration.

How to prepare for the challenge

• A key aspect that helps mitigate the risk of software integration problems is a well-designed system architecture (based on API, web services, data buses).
• Once the integration is properly designed, you must create specifications to establish the interfaces and data flows. It is important to define responsibility, that is, which side is responsible for a given interface.
• Next, share the API in the DEV and TEST environments. Your test API must contain correct data covering all test cases to allow you to test your integration on environments prior to UAT (user acceptance tests) or PROD (production tests).
• Last but not least, you need to add integration tests to your CI/CD pipeline.

Challenge # 4: Software Quality

Low software quality involves a number of negative side effects, which directly translate into low customer satisfaction ratings. And, as you know, a dissatisfied customer is a customer who refuses to pay for your services, often breaks the contract, and signs on your competition. 

If you frequently release low-quality solutions, customer loyalty will weaken, and they will leave, which spells lower performance and redundancy programs for your business.

In addition, low software quality also affects programmer productivity. IT teams that produce low-quality products are slower, less committed, and more stressed.

How to prepare for the challenge 

• To improve software quality, bet on early testing. Early testing allows you to catch small defects, which could become bigger issues further down the road. It is also an opportunity to spot serious errors (e.g., in architecture or integration) early on in the project, which can be very expensive to fix later but, when spotted early, can be eliminated at a fraction of the cost. 
• Test early and test often with automation. Manual tests require a lot of attention and are often toilsome and repetitive, which increases the risk of error. It is a more effective strategy to automate and include tests in the CI/CD pipeline.  
• Implement quality control from the start of the project. The role of testers is to monitor quality control, which should begin at the start of software development and continue throughout the entire delivery period. This will tell your teams that their work is up to scratch and that they deliver a high-quality product.

In the example of one of our projects, we can show how the cost of fixing errors changes depending on the stage of software development at which they can be detected:

Each stage of bug detection has a different cost estimation.

Challenge # 5: Technical Debt

Technical debt is a shortcut – businesses might feel tempted to take it on when they want to meet their needs quickly and, e.g., release a product before their competition does. To do so, you might reach for non-optimal technical solutions; these will frequently meet your short-term goals (which may make sense in business terms, e.g., if we want to verify a hypothesis quickly) but may stand in the way of your long-term plans or even make them impossible to achieve.

It is important to understand that before you have paid off your technical debt, you will not be able to make any new investments or further streamline your projects. 

If you delay or omit to pay off your debt, you risk:

• More code errors and reduced app security;
• Less flexible software and costly functionality changes;
• Teams focused on system maintenance, with no space for innovation;
• Slower progress, more stress, and a wave of redundancies among programmers,
• Exceeded budgets, missed deadlines and reduced business competitiveness.

How to prepare for the challenge

• Technical debt should be taken on only after consultation with the business and then recorded on an ongoing basis.
• Recorded positions will provide the input for further sprints, which must consider not only software development but also the debt payoff.
• The company should build a process for inventories and successively pay off the debt.
• Any person involved in a project must be aware of the debt and the payoff process.
• The team helps the product owner to decide on the payoff stages, depending on predefined priorities.

Remember those appropriate coding standards, in tandem with refactoring, will allow the risk of technical debt to be minimized. “Small” changes must be introduced continuously, while the larger ones should be recorded and implemented in alignment with your priorities.

Be Prepared for All Challenges During Software Projects

We have discussed five examples of recurrent project challenges which are often overlooked by developers but should be mitigated from the beginning of any project. Of course, the list is far from exhaustive; there are many more risks you would do well to eliminate early on or at least address with mitigation measures.

Every team leader and decision-maker should also be mindful of the need to reduce employee turnover, improve team performance, and manage risk (e.g., by drawing up risk response plans or procedures).

Additional Reading:

• How to Create a Software Development Plan
• 7 Web Development Best Practices
• How to Put Together Your Ideal Software Development Team

About the Author

Prem Górecki CTO at Altkom Software

Prem is a CTO at Altkom Softaware – Custom Software Development Company with more than 20 years of experience. In his career, he has cooperated with a variety of companies and participated in multiple business projects. An expert in recognizing the needs of business clients and matching optimal IT solutions.

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