Welcome back to Z to A Pulse, the monthly Zuci Systems newsletter covering the most insightful yet unspoken topics around engineering excellence.
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In today’s issue, we see how organizations can deploy flawless software solutions.
I have been waiting to cover this topic for a long time because of the increasing skepticism around software failures. And I always wanted to reach out to one technology leader I’ve admired and ask a few questions about how she exemplifies flawless delivery every time.
Technology Expert of the Month
Sridevi Ramasamy (Shri), Solution Architect and Technical Manager at Zuci Systems.
As a Solution Architect and Technical Manager, Shri leads Zuci’s digital engineering division, overseeing the hosted environments for our customers. Passionate about building teams and fostering collaboration, Shri is skilled at creating long-term digital transformation strategies. She brings over two decades of experience in banking, healthcare, and retail.
Let’s find out straight from our star solution architect, Shri, on what she thinks about maintaining software delivery quality, empowering customers, and enabling a high-performance culture for flawless delivery.
Let’s just drop right in, shall we?
Janaha: Where does the journey of a flawless delivery start?
Shri: The conventional wisdom for a successful product is always to understand the market, competition, and customer needs and then define the scope of work.
But if you ask, why do we start here? Well, this helps to understand/determine unique expectations for the client and define the definition of done by involving the team from product, development, and QA.
The real catch I have seen many a time is that the first demo is the most important one. This is where your journey to a flawless delivery starts and enables us to set the expectations for the continuous delivery process for the project execution.
The feedback from the 1st demo is the key to measuring the success vs. expectation defined earlier. If the client is unsatisfied after the 1st demo, then the expectations should be revisited. This includes both the business requirements and the non-functional requirements. You should discuss this with the client to set the right expectations and make changes early in the lifecycle.
Remember, the key to flawless delivery is redefining the SDLC at every step of the project.
Janaha: What are the key factors for successful delivery?
Shri: Successful delivery is one where the product is delivered with the required functionality and in a manner that meets the customer’s expectations.
But the goal of flawless delivery should not just be to meet deadlines but also to provide value through the consistent delivery of quality work.
It can be achieved by combining several factors, including:
- Creative Agility in solutioning
- Quick adoption to changes and
- Communication across the board (team & stakeholders).
Janaha: Does the same process work for every client?
Shri: Having worked with various clients across multiple domains, I have realized that the same process doesn’t always work. Every new project has its own home-grown culture in which it wants to fit. Based on the business goals and the project roadmap, this should be looked up. A few components I take into account while defining the process for delivery are:
- Business Objectives: These are very subjective. Hence, it must be defined by consulting the client and agreeing upon the expected outcomes.
- Delivery Process: This needs to be tailored to meet the specific customer needs for the respective deliverables for every phase of the development process.
- Enhancements vs. BAU tasks: These are different buckets of work and need to have different approaches to execution.
Janaha: Agile or Waterfall? Which one to choose?
Shri: You have to ensure that your delivery model fits your organizational culture and benefits the client’s business objectives.
From my experience, a robust software delivery approach should have:
- Frequent demo to stakeholders
- Incremental delivery of the product to the client
- Exclusive UAT environment (for the client) right after sprint 1 to final deployment.
One of the best approaches could also be using managed services. This reduces rebuilding the respective solutions, which can be readily used through third-party vendors. These enable you to focus on business objectives for building the products and going to market sooner.
Janaha: What are the main factors that slow down app production? How to fix it?
Shri: Three factors often hamper the development process for applications:
- Lack of a clear vision: The product development team should have a clear idea of what the final product should look like and how it should work. It may be hard for some teams to really know what they want, but if you can’t explain it in words, you probably don’t know what you want.
- Poor planning: Even though your delivery strategy looks great on paper, if it doesn’t make sense for your organization and its customers, then it won’t work. Your deployment strategy needs to be adapted based on the feedback from early adopters and customers using your app.
- Lack of a clear testing strategy: Testing should be an essential part of any SDLC — not just for bug fixes but also for feature development and marketing purposes as well (it’s always better to have too many features than too few). A clear testing strategy should help you find bugs earlier in the cycle, which helps prevent them from becoming production issues down the road.
The solution to slow delivery is not fast delivery.
Take your time, plan carefully and think through everything you’re doing before starting work. Even if there are delays between projects and unexpected problems along the way, at least you’ll know exactly what happens when things go wrong and how best to deal with them.
Janaha: What are your biggest challenges in securing apps and data? How do you address them?
Shri: The biggest challenge is ensuring security throughout the application’s development strategy and deployment. This means considering security from the beginning and ensuring it’s baked into your application at every step. It’s a best practice to add it from day one!
And finally, we need to ensure we have enough monitoring, logging, and alerting set up so we can catch anything out of the ordinary happening with our applications or data stores. Whenever there are any suspicious events, the respective alerts must be triggered from the system for further investigation.
Janaha: Can you make every project a flawless delivery?
Shri: Yes! Flawless software delivery is not a myth. It is possible to make every project successful if you have the right team in place and follow some key processes along the way.
In conclusion, organizations need the right people on board with the right skillsets for each job role to deliver flawless software. These individuals must communicate well and collaborate effectively with one another and vendors/partners involved with the project(s).
Question For You:
What are the biggest challenges you face in your product development?
Let us know in the comments.
Thank you for reading! Stay tuned with us for future editions, where we will be back with an exciting take on other topics about engineering excellence.
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