As a software developer & business person it’s a shame to see so much software thrown away. It could have been the best software in the world, well architected, scalable, passed W3 guidelines, with just the right level of encapsulation. All the same a backup sits on a DVD in your drawer or on the cloud. Why? Well there are certainly four reasons that instantly come to mind for me and I’m sure many more for you:
- The developers weren’t good enough.
- Feature creep happened, “we’ll just add that it’s not a big deal”. In the meantime development ran out of money.
- Customers didn’t buy it.
- The software took too long to develop, in the meantime the company strategy changed.
- The team gave up and ran out of interest in the product as it took too long to bring to market.
What’s the best solution for this and how can we help start-ups developing software reduce the risk of their software being put into the software graveyard.
At Inc60™ we think a really pragmatic approach is called for for software development. It should be an an iterative process through the requirements analysis, design & evaluation until we a clear Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that customers have said they will buy. This should all be done without writing one one line of code. Lots of tools comes to mind but definitely InnvisionApp and Balsamiq.
Overview pic a bit too nerdy? Probably but sometimes we’re allowed 😉