Finding the best practices and approaches when creating a custom solution can make the difference between great results and lackluster ones. The reason is simple, as you grow your business, you will experience many pitfalls and challenges. What you want to do is to learn what pitfalls can appear, and then take the right steps and also have a plan B to help solve such issues. Doing that is excellent, and it will convey great results.
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A lack of planning
You always need to have a proper plan if you create any custom solution. A lack of planning or a bad architecture/framework can be extremely problematic and that will lead to a vast range of issues. That’s the last thing you want, so the best approach here is to focus on creating a great, comprehensive plan with adequate timelines. Use the industry best practices too.
Little to no feedback from users
Since that user wants a custom solution, you want to communicate with them as much as possible. The idea is to bring their vision to life, and without feedback or communication, that will be very hard to do. Relying on off-the-shelf solutions is never going to be a solution, instead you want to have a proper guideline from the client/user. That way, you can make the customization process a lot easier.
Not enough testing
When you create any custom solution, that means you’re reaching uncharted territory and a lot of things are untested. In general, custom software needs a lot more testing, to ensure all features are working accordingly. For the most part, custom solutions have new features and innovations. Those might not always work the way you want, and that alone can be a downside. It’s exactly why you want to test it all out countless times, just to ensure it works.
There’s no maintenance plan
Aside from creating the custom solution, you also want to have a plan for its long term support. Most of the time, you will find companies don’t have any maintenance program in mind. That’s a problem, because you want to ensure customers you’ll deliver maintenance, bug fixes and updates regularly. Without a plan, that can become an issue.
Insufficient documentation
When a development team embarks into such a custom project, they need as much documentation as possible. However, if the documentation is incomplete, that can easily become a problem. In that case, the best thing you can do is to focus on connecting with the client and ensuring all details are covered. Otherwise, that can lead to expensive repairs and issues down the line.
These are only a few of the pitfalls that can arise during custom solution development. Custom solutions are known to be very subjective, and that’s why rightful documentation and enough communication are a must-have. In addition, you also want to ensure there’s a maintenance plan and proper project management, so you can prevent any downsides. Once you have that, results can be very good every step of the way!
