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Once you come up with the idea of creating a software product and have proof of concept, you can start thinking about how much it takes to bring it to life. There is much work to be done before your product hits the market, but the question I want to discuss in this article is how much time it will take to develop the software.
To start with, you should decide whether you want an on-site development team who will work as a part of your company or whether you want to outsource. In my experience, outsourcing might be the best solution if you are a product company, for many IT service providers know the inside out of managing technical projects and a team of developers. According to some sources, 60% of companies outsource app development.
Once you have decided who will develop your product, you want to know when you can release it. There are several ways of estimating development time.
Keep in mind that development time estimation is not constant. As much as both sides of the project would like it to be. But some methodologies and factors can help to come up with an approximate time scope.
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Reasons For Development Time Estimation
As a client, you would like to know the approximate date of your product’s release; for this, you should understand the scope of work. Also, estimating time will help you to calculate the budget and will give you a transparent outlook of the work that should be done.
As a software development partner, time estimation helps to accomplish the scope of work and set the team, tasks and workload in order to avoid working out of the scope and budget. Thus deadlines can be set, and risks accounted for.
The development time consists not only of the scope of work, but you should also consider risk buffers and time-eaters, both of which are hard to foresee and unable to control. Time-eaters can refer to communication issues between team members and people who are unable to work. Risk buffers refer to any stumbling points that need time to be solved.
Factors That Influence Time Estimation
Various factors influence the time frame of developing the project.
First is the type of project. The more complex and unique the project is, the more time it needs in order to be built. A banking app development time will definitely differ from an app for virtual experience shopping. And the more screens you require, the longer the time will be.
The second thing to consider is whether you have to migrate large amounts of data from one system to another. The data should be modified to be suitable for your new solution, which can be done with the help of a custom script. After data has been moved, testing has to take place to see if everything works as expected. While, in my experience, the migration is not a complex task, it is time-consuming and takes software engineering.
The number of features, complexity in functionality and difficulty in implementation also dictate the development time. For example, it usually takes anywhere from three to six months to develop an app with simple functionality but six to nine months to make an average-complexity product. I have seen it take nine months to build an app that is highly complex in functionality.
The time frame will also depend on is you are building a unique UI/UX solution. This process takes extensive research, analyses, design and implementation and does not utilize as many existing solutions.
The consistency of your requirement also plays a significant role. The better view of your project you have, the more precise requirements you get. If you still haven’t finalized the main idea and purpose of the product, it is more likely your needs will change along the way, and this will affect the time and budget. Business requirements documents and project specifications should help you to avoid this and give you an idea of where you may have gaps.
Last but not least, there is the complexity of integrating the new software within your business system. Some integrations are easy, but others require more time and effort.
Stages And Timelines Of Building A Software
There are usually three stages of software development. They are:
Requirements And Design (Two To Four Weeks)
This stage includes drafting the system requirements, features and the design of your future product and prioritizing the development tasks. Through this phase, you should make all the decisions to scope your budget and architecture and make a precise plan for your software product development.
Planning, Architecture And Development (Three To Six Months)
Planning involves structuring the development team’s work, setting the tasks and allocating resources. It might take up to two days. Then the framework is built. The tech architecture is chosen, which includes technologies that will be used to develop software. This stage may last up to two weeks. The longest process is code writing. The time varies and depends on the factors we mentioned above.
Software Testing (Three To Six weeks)
Testing should be done during the whole development lifecycle. Once the whole technical project is developed, all the features should be tested as a whole unit. The types of tests depend on the type of your project. Through the final step, the tester compares the original specifications with the built software and whether everything answers the initial requirements.
From proof-of-concept to the final project, I hope that this guide gives you a better understanding of the time it can take to develop software as well as some of the steps involved.
Remember, there is never one solution for every product or a single time estimate for every project. And while I explained three main stages in the software development process, often there are more; for some projects, I recommend adding a stage of cost optimization (mostly for huge platforms) or a separate deployment stage.
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