Modern products and systems are nothing like their counterparts from a few decades ago. From having a single purpose and everything hardcoded in the programming, to having a gigantic feature set and AI-driven decision making; technological tools and products have come a long way.
There was a time when all a car had to do was burn fuel and stay mobile; today, a car is responsible for showing you directions, finding ways to optimize fuel usage, connect with your phone, adjust its suspension based on the terrain, parking and sometimes even driving itself.
Manufacturing a modern car requires extensive and efficient collaboration between different electrical, mechanical, and software systems; it’s a prime example of how complex product development has become in today’s world.
According to Statista, there are a whopping 30.73 billion connected devices in the world right now. The number is only expected to grow. Almost every gadget/application around you needs to connect with a remote system or other gadgets to be of value.
From your personal assistant to your laptop, from your smart fridge to your mobile phone, and from your sensors to your management dashboards; everything depends on something else, which depends on something else, and so on… Building such interdependent applications and systems is expectedly complex.
Similar to the tools and systems, modern product development has also evolved over the years. It’s no longer a straightforward process involving one requirement gathering meeting, one huge development iteration, and subsequent delivery after functional testing.
It’s now a complicated, multi-step process that involves perpetual cross-functional collaboration and continuous optimization of the product.
Developing a product doesn’t just involve writing code to make things work. It has many distinct, important stages:
Product development teams tasked with the development, delivery, and maintenance of complicated software systems face a unique set of challenges.
Customers and many high-level stakeholders are often non-technical people. That’s why their requirements don’t always translate into changes/features easily. For example, a director might say, “I want the location information of the subscriber to appear instantly after I press the button, and not after 2-3 seconds”. However, since the information is residing on a third-party network and their API can’t serve responses any faster, the developers might not have much to work with.
Moreover, requirements also often undergo a lot of changes before they are finalized. Developers are often halfway through the implementation of a feature when they hear that it’s no longer desired by the customer. This can be avoided by using cross-functional collaboration solutions that allow any changes to be escalated to relevant parties before it’s too late.
The system architect thinks that a certain dropdown should only show 3 options. However, the product manager thinks that an additional option should also be displayed. The development manager has a stringent deadline to meet, but because of these conflicting requirements, their progress is hindered. Without the presence of a cross-functional collaboration solution, this roadblock would not be easy to overcome.
People with no technical knowledge of a system shouldn’t estimate the time it would take to make a change in it, but they do. Delivering high-performing, scalable applications by stringent deadlines is a massive challenge.
The system engineers, developers, and managers need to collaborate to resolve any conflicts and catalyze the development process. However, most organizations don’t have a way for cross-functional teams to collaborate. Everybody processes information on their own tools (Requirement management, change management, issue tracking systems) but there is no collaboration between any of these tools. This leads to discrepancies in information across different tools and a huge lapse in productivity.
In order to meet stringent deadlines, developers sometimes choose the easy solution, instead of the recommended ones. This often involves disregarding the best coding practices and using shortcuts. These shortcuts and easy solutions hamper the overall quality of the code and require extensive rework at a later time. Almost all software applications have technical debt, but in fast-paced work environments, developers often fail to find any time to resolve it.
An organization’s collective success is contingent on efficient, cross-functional collaboration. The easier it is for people to communicate across different teams, the higher their productivity will be.
SodiusWillert integrates OSLC-based API tools across the engineering enterprise to enable engineers to do their best jobs. OSLC reduces the complexity and risk of increasingly complex software infrastructures and improves the value of software across a broader set of internal and external stakeholders.
Learn more about our OSLC Connect solutions to help engineering teams optimize complex product development processes.