Imagine the following scenario: you have a problem in your company and want to hire the services of a software development provider, you talk to them and approve the proposal that you’ve been sent, about three months later things are not going well, the application has been delivered on time but with a lot of bugs, users complain in the app store and leave negative ratings. What’s the solution? You now have to hire another company to redesign the application and therefore the initial estimated costs have increased, sound familiar?

This happens to a lot of people! The reason to why this happens, we refer to a study conducted by the University of Cambridge published in 2013, which indicated that programmers spend about 50% of their time finding and fixing bugs, this was estimated with the cost of employing software developers and determined that the expenses to the world economy of this inefficiency would be about $312 billion per year.

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3 reasons why they are doing it wrong

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Researching a little more about the problem that software development companies have and part of its inefficiency, we found three possible reasons:

# 1 Growth management isn’t within their plans

Companies often forget that making an application goes well beyond publishing it in the app store. Where will users come from? What happens to the errors that they report? All this is intended to be solved with a strategy called “growth management“, where the developing company can be monitoring all bugs that users report in stores and give written responses to the user, furthermore, taking technical actions and repairing the code that causes the malfunction.

This is also complemented by mobile marketing strategies to capture new users for the application, with it comes to a new paradigm of what software developers should and should not do.

# 2 Only the QA team does their job

Quality control is something that many companies of applications and software development have implemented, they have a group focused on reviewing during the development of the application to assure that it works well. What’s the problem? Depending on the number of filters and people, everything becomes subjective, the smaller the quality assurance team is the harder it is to be able to see all the errors that the application has.

This is resolved with a little dedication, which may translate into learning costs for the company, every programmer must learn to do software testing, no matter what level, whether a junior or senior, anyone who writes codes must know-how.

# 3 Accompaniment to follow the best path

This goes hand in hand with the growth management strategy and something to keep in mind, software companies have materialized the ideas of many entrepreneurs and companies, so they have an idea on how to follow the best path for a client’s project to be successful, just knowing what the project’s cost of implementing a technology allows them to know the possible costs of scaling the application.

The inconvenience arises when there is no real accompaniment, and the developer is limited to create what the customer has asked for, and in the creating business each expert is key to success, so both sides should meet and evaluate the business model and how the software is solving a real necessity and not just a whim of the company that is hiring the service.

The true cost of bad software

Only one technical failure is necessary for a company to lose a large amount of money and many customers. Poor implementation of a payment system and not having it fixed in 24 hours can create costs that companies would never have estimated, that’s why software companies should always “run an extra mile for the customer, “and Quality Assurance services are the key piece that any business owner must be taken into account when making recruitment.

What are those typical mistakes that make companies lose money?

A project not intended to be scalable from the start.
A bad strategy for attracting users after launching the application.
A non-existent management and response service to technical failures (including those related to the code).
Inefficient of the quality control processes.
Lack of monitoring of the user’s reviews in app stores.

Feedback from your experience is important!

The number of mistakes that someone can make when hiring a development company of mobile applications or software is high, every experience is useful. Do you want to give us your experience of hiring software developers?