5 Roadblocks Slowing Down Software Development — and How to Overcome Them5 Roadblocks Slowing Down Software Development — and How to Overcome Them5 Roadblocks Slowing Down Software Development — and How to Overcome Them

A key priority for most of today's software development teams is not just to build good software, but also to build and release it as quickly as possible — hence the fixation on continuous delivery , or the practice of deploying application updates on a near-continuous basis.

However, saying that you develop software quickly can be quite different from actually doing it. Too often, development teams run into problems that can slow down the software development life cycle . The result is missed deployment targets and, in many cases, unhappy managers or business owners, who tend not to be pleased when they believe developers are not generating software updates as quickly as they should.

Getting ahead of delays in software development requires knowing which conditions can disrupt the process — which we explore this article.

Incomplete Integration Testing

One sure-fire way to slow down software development is failing to run sufficient integration tests.

An integration test is a type of software test that evaluates how well application components work together. Typically, teams perform integration tests relatively early in the development life cycle as a way of vetting whether newly written code integrates properly with other parts of the application.

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If you don't run integration tests for all of your code, you face the risk of not catching compatibility problems until much later. At that point, you have to go back and rewrite the original code, possibly creating new compatibility issues due to the changes.

The solution is to ensure that you run a comprehensive set of integration tests — enough to cover all of your code and detect any integration issues as early as possible.

Lack of Environment Parity

In software development, environment parity means that the environment where developers build and test applications resembles the production environment as closely as possible. Differences between the environments may lead to application performance or security problems that developers didn't catch during testing because the environment variables or conditions that trigger the issues are only present in the production environment.

Historically, achieving environment parity tended to be challenging because most developers couldn't easily emulate the various environments in which their end users might install software. But with container technology , this problem has become simple to solve. By testing and deploying applications using containers, which abstract the applications from most variables present on host servers, developers get consistency between the testing and production stages.

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Poorly Implemented DevSecOps

Over the past decade or so, many organizations have come to embrace DevSecOps , which entails the integration of security testing directly into the software development process.

DevSecOps offers the important benefit of helping to enhance application security. But it can also slow down development operations, especially if security tests occur at times or in ways that could complicate development efforts.

For example, if developers wait to perform security tests until they've completed performance tests, there's a risk that they'll have to change their code to address security issues and create new performance problems in the process. That means they'll then need to run performance tests, followed by security tests, a second time — resulting in major delays in the development life cycle.

The solution here is simple enough: Security teams should integrate their tests into development processes in ways that complement, rather than hinder, the work completed by developers.

Gold Plating

Gold plating is software development jargon that refers to the practice of trying to perfect a product before releasing it.

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Historically, when some businesses released software updates as infrequently as every few years, gold plating made sense in some circumstances. If you were going to make your users wait years before giving them a new version of your platform, you might as well make it perfect as much as you could.

But today — when software is more commonly deployed using a SaaS model and businesses have the ability to roll out updates whenever they want — there is little value in gold plating. A better mantra is to release software updates early and often, provided they meet a reasonable level of quality and security. You can always fix the minor imperfections in a future software release.

Deployment Challenges

The final step in the software delivery life cycle is deploying your new application or feature. And while deployment is often simple compared with the complex processes of designing, implementing, building, and testing code, deployment can go awry — resulting in situations where a new application release is ready to go but doesn't reach end users as quickly as it should due to deployment delays.

Those delays typically stem from issues associated with moving an app from a testing environment to production and rolling it out to end users. For example, a new version of the app may require changes to networking configurations or access control settings, and problems implementing those changes may delay the deployment.

This is another area where container technology can help because it increases parity between testing and production environments, making it easy to deploy to production using the same containers that teams used to test an app.

In addition, progressive delivery practices , which release new software updates to users incrementally rather than pushing them out to all users at once, can help provide early feedback about deployment issues. Progressive delivery on its own won't solve deployment obstacles, but by discovering any issues early, and when they only impact a small number of end users, the practice can make them easier to resolve.

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