Services
The Right App
What is the right software application?
Developing software applications has traditionally been a real headache. According to the National Institute of Standards, 75% of all software development projects ship late or over budget. And what about the remaining 25%? Those projects fail outright.*
ELC Technologies’ agile approach to software development breaks with tradition not only by delivering your application on time and within budget but also by building a product that genuinely meets organizational goals and customer needs. That’s what we consider the right app.
Why does traditional software development fall short ?
If you’ve ever participated in a traditional software development effort then these failure statistics shouldn’t surprise you. Traditional development requires a rigid methodology with long lead times.
First, requirements are gathered. Feature requests are synthesized and prioritized from customers, marketing, finance, sales, operations and other stakeholders, usually a long and time consuming process.
From this exercise, a specifications document is generate that guides all development. Any changes from spec require a change order that often translates to increased engagement costs and an extended timeline.
Finally, development begins. And, continues typically for nine months or longer with little client input before a beta version built to spec is made available for viewing. By this time, market forces have shifted, competitors have launched new products, industry messaging has evolved, and/or customer requirements have changed and the specs are likely out of date.
This disconnect is compounded when users begin to test the application. Inevitably, there is a difference between the perceived requirements collected at the project’s inception and the real requirements that arise as the user interacts with the application.
After all, just because you’ve delivered an application to spec doesn’t mean you’ve delivered the right application—one that meets the real needs of your target audience and organization.
The process of testing, fixing, and optimizing the application to address the evolving requirements of your stakeholders can seem never ending, especially since the application is architected to fulfill the initial project requirements. The architecture is often inflexible and requires massive rewrites to be useful, much less ground-breaking. On and on it goes. It’s no wonder that most software development projects run over cost and beyond schedule or even fail outright.
Why is ELC’s development approach more successful?
ELC Technologies has built a better method for software development that lowers total cost and ensures that you get the right software application out the door on schedule. Our secret isn’t so much what we do. It’s how we do it. And it all begins with our philosophy.
Our philosophy is that software development is a creative endeavor that requires flexibility. It’s a living, breathing, organic affair. Consequently, identifying and building the right application that meets the real needs of your customers and your organization is a moving target that requires constant feedback.
- Instead of valuing a static and detailed specification, we value live, working software that you (and your customers) can see early and often.
- Instead of working long development cycles, we work short iterations usually one to two weeks.
- Instead of holding you to a change order process, we expect modifications and make it easy for you to adjust feature sets on the fly.
- Instead of separating you from the development via process and project management, we value a dynamic, transparent interplay between you and the development team.
- Instead of building everything from scratch, we leverage a decade of code development with ELC Core to rapidly build a proven application foundation, allowing you to focus on innovation, while simplifying maintenance.
Simply put, we value the freedom and possibilities that occur when robust tools are leveraged and software development is treated like a creative endeavor. When you can use software building blocks to quickly erect your application framework you are able to significantly invest in differentiating features while ensuring an application core that is easy to scale, extend and maintain. When you and your customers can interact with the software early and often and can easily make changes, you are able to immediately respond to evolving market conditions. The result is an application that is built from experience that goes beyond specs to address the real, versus theoretical, requirements of your customers and organization.
Partnering with ELC simplifies software development, ensuring you successfully build the right application with no aspirin needed.
Learn more about how we develop software using our preferred platform Ruby on Rails or about our foundational code library, ELC Core.
* 25% of all software projects fail outright through eventual cancellation with no useful software deployed.” - Standish Group’s CHAOS report, 2000
