Applications of all kinds are continually popping up across various industries to help improve consumer customer experiences, provide entertainment, make certain tedious or error-prone tasks easier for workers and to help businesses improve their operations overall. In fact, there are over 5.4 million applications available across the Apple App and Google Play stores as of this year.
As more and more individuals and organizations turn to applications for various experiences and to drive enterprise efficiencies, we need to take stock of the process we deploy in application development.
The Inefficiencies of Application Development
Today, it is estimated that there are more than 26 million software developers worldwide. Each of these developers brings a unique combination of creativity and technology acumen to the organizations they work for and the applications they create. However, the current application development process in many enterprises is riddled with inefficiencies that often require these talented developers to focus on tedious, mundane, non-innovation-related tasks.
Technical Debt: Renowned programmer Ward Cunningham first introduced the concept of technical debt in 1992, stating, “Shipping first-time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. Objects make the cost of this transaction tolerable. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.” What many didn’t realize at the time was that technical debt would grow to be a major issue in software and application development years later. Recently, a new Scandinavian study found that developers dedicate 23% of their time, on average, to addressing technical debt. While this statistic alone should be alarming to enterprises—given their development teams are spending a quarter of their time on an issue that could have been avoided had a different approach been taken—the study also found that developers often have to introduce new technical debt in the process.
Maintenance: As with all technological equipment, applications require routine maintenance to ensure they remain working for the end user, provide ongoing value and are secure. However, unlike a car or kitchen appliance, applications see far more frequent updates from operating systems (OSes), cloud or hardware providers that need to be addressed by development teams. According to research from Stripe, developers spend more than 17 hours per week on maintenance issues like debugging or refactoring. For instance, take a look at Apple. From the time iOS 15 was released in June 2021 as a beta, there were more than a dozen updates made to the OS until early September 2022. That means that every single time the updates were released, developers had to spend time ensuring their applications were working correctly, were bug-free or complied with new security measures. When you add this to the fact that the average enterprise app has 110 third-party integrations, that is an extreme amount of maintenance.
The Reinvention of the Wheel: Of all the applications available today, many of them consist of the same foundational features and functionality—login, chat, social sharing, payments and more. What’s astonishing about this is that developers are frequently recreating each of these common features and functionalities from scratch every time they develop a new application.
It is clear that these tasks are highly inefficient, and it begs the question, “What can be done to address these inefficiencies?”
Prioritizing Innovation
It is not enough to just introduce some sort of technology in the hopes that it makes application development more efficient. It also requires an overall mindset change by enterprises. Yes, it is still of the utmost importance to get applications to market quickly and keep up with the pace of competition; however, innovation doesn’t have to be sacrificed to do so.
Innovation must be the key driver for enterprises and their development teams. Providing unique value and experiences to end users will truly set enterprises and their applications apart from the competition. But, the reality is that nearly 80% of technology leaders from around the world believe basic application maintenance and support are the biggest barriers to innovation.
Enterprises must be able to balance innovation, time-to-market and development processes that are free of technical debt and outrageous maintenance support.
Making Application Development More Efficient
One way in which enterprises can balance innovation, commercialization, and development is through an emerging approach to application development known as features-as-a-service (FaaS).
A FaaS approach to application development enables enterprises to implement an agile and accelerated engineering process—similar to that of low-code/no-code without the constraints often seen with those vendors and their functionality today—without sacrificing quality, code or time. More specifically, it combines pre-coded “commodity” features with continuous and automatic updates that empower development teams to spend their time and creative minds on innovation. In most cases, this approach can help enterprises bring applications to market within weeks instead of months and limits the headaches on the backend for development teams down the line.
As enterprises work through the fourth quarter of this year, I implore them to reconsider their development process at a fundamental level and bring innovation to the forefront before the beginning of 2023. Time and resources are of the essence, and something must be done now to address the inefficiencies of application development.
