In the good old days custom software projects were simply. there were some kind of an initial interaction with the customer called as specification or analysis then developing and architecting a solution and at the end some kind of a delivery. Independently if the project was running in a classical waterfall style or something more fancy agile style software projects had the following roles:
- Business Analyst / Industry Business Consultant: to help for the customer to create / update / finalize the specification.
- Software Architekt / Developer : to implement the software itself.
- Infrastructure expert: to deal with special infrastructure oriented questions.
- Tester: to quarante software quality.
- Project Manager / Scrum Master: to coordinate the whole process.
- Sales: selling the software.
- Sales: selling the software.
In the meantime complex development frameworks appeared as well making a custom software development from the end customer point of view simpler, usually reducing the development efforts and making possible a much faster agiler and bug-free software delivery. Typical examples for these frameworks:
- Rapid application development frameworks: these are practically rather development oriented frameworks that make the coding much faster, implying in less coding resources. Examples were for instance the Enterprise Library for .NET framework.
- Complex Business Solutions: There are a lot of initiative to provide a framework with many use cases out of the box, starting from the most common user and identity services to complex business applications or apps implying reduced again the need for reduced resources in the classical technical coding - testing fields. Example is Odoo Business Apps.
- Self-Service Solutions: Last but not least there are many solutions that work in a self-service manner, providing the possibility for end-customers without prior development or even IT knowledge to build up software applications themself. Examples are elements in the Azure cloud, like PowerApps or PowerBI.
Certainly there is a catch using these frameworks. Even if they are theoretical self-service or providing a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, they reach in real life a highly increased technical complexity. So configuring these frameworks usually require pretty much know-how, as a consequence delivering solutions with such frameworks require highly increased IT consulting (Figure 1).
Certainly there is a catch using these frameworks. Even if they are theoretical self-service or providing a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, they reach in real life a highly increased technical complexity. So configuring these frameworks usually require pretty much know-how, as a consequence delivering solutions with such frameworks require highly increased IT consulting (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Roles and resources in different IT projects.
So the question is in which direction can we imagine the further development of custom software development and delivery, I think there are three major factors that should be considered:
- Sharing economy: As software are not necessarily developed from the zero but rather half-ready parts are configured together sharing parts of the software will play an always increasing role. Something similar is already happening on the cloud backend side, instead of individual software, everyone try to concentrate on creating and sharing (or selling) micro-services. On the other hand, certain software configuration frameworks like Azure PowerApps already contain built-in feature to share part or the whole application. It is important to note that sharing does not only make an application available, but the collected domain and industry know how as well. As an example supposing that I spent 20 years in the logistics field and I create and publish my custom logistics application then indirectly part of my collected domain know-how will be shared as well.
- Electronic Markets: Electronic markets are similar to sharing economy, making possible that the collected knowledge is used by someone else. Direct applications of the market can be selling and reselling building blocks of a software or whole ready to go solutions.
- Machine Intelligence: Despite machine intelligence is pretty much in an over-hype-cycle at the moment, it can be used to analyzing or refining specification of a software. Creating the first requirement analysis with machine intelligence is certainly difficult, although there are some attempts for that like in process mining. If a version of a software set up however it is simple to monitor the usage of the software itself, analyzing the data with machine learning and proposing a new better version of the software automatically. Example for such a framework is the Gird, fully automated web pages based on machine learning of web traffic.
- Robo advisors: To decrease the complexity of a configuration framework from an end-customer perspective and eliminate the need of IT consultancy Robo-advisors can be used. Although such advisors are more typical in the fintech field at the moment, it is not illusory to imagine that similar technology can be implemented in the software development branch.
So as a conclusion let we imagine perhaps in the not far future a classical software development example as an end-customer needs some kind of a custom software for supporting his business processes. Let we investigate which human resources and roles do we need for that:
- Do we need Business Analyst - Software Architekt - Business Consultants for creating and delivering a custom software solution ? Well, not necessarily, firstly ready-to-go software solutions can be bought via online markets or simply used via sharing platforms. If the end-customer does not find a ready ready solution, custom software solution configurations can be used in a self-service manner with the help of robo-advisors and machine learning to create the necessarily solution.
- Do we need Developers - Software Architects or Testers for creating and delivering a custom software solution ? Well, not necessarily, If we work with configurable software solution frameworks, most software is produced on a self-service manner. Certainly such frameworks have to be implemented first in a classical way, however if they are created already, concrete software solution development can be realized without developers, software architects or testers.
- Do we need Infrastructure experts for creating and delivering a custom software solution ? Well, not necessarily, if everything is hosted in the cloud than minimal infrastructure expertise is required.
- Do we need sales people for selling a custom software solution ? Well, not necessarily. if everything is sold via online markets and application stores than further sales support can be avoided.
- Do we need Project Manager for creating and delivering a custom software solution? Well, not necessarily, if we consider the previous points the only human in the software delivery process is the customer, so project management is not required.
