When developing custom software, whether it is ERP, CRM, BPM, or any other system, you must ensure that your bespoke solution is future-proof. After all, custom software that can easily scale and adapt will remain efficient and resilient in the long run and evolve with your business seamlessly, maximizing the development ROI.
4 Tips for Future-Proofing Software
- Implement a modular architecture design.
- Host a custom solution in the cloud.
- Focus on cloud quality.
- Prioritize scalability testing.
Why Should You Future-Proof Your Software?
First of all, by future-proofing software during custom development, companies can achieve advanced software scalability, which is essential for maximizing a solution’s lifespan. A durable and easy-to-scale software solution can handle increasing amounts of data, transactions and users without compromising performance or user experience. You can expect it to remain stable as your company and the number of business users grow, so that you can minimize the risks of operational disruptions caused by software outages and downtime.
Further, software future-proofing can help a company achieve advanced technological flexibility, which is crucial for long-term success. Improved software flexibility enables a business to seamlessly add new capabilities or change the underlying functionality anytime as the company's business requirements evolve, without costly rewrites and overhauls. As Chris Hanson and Gerald Jay Sussman wrote in their book Software Design for Flexibility, “The best systems are evolvable; they can be adapted for new situations by adding code, rather than changing the existing code.”
How to Ensure the Longevity of a Software Solution
Fortunately, you can take some simple steps to future-proof anything you build.
Implement a Modular Architecture Design
The choice of a particular architectural design can significantly affect the scalability and flexibility of a custom solution, so you should choose one carefully. If you prioritize software agility, consider using a modular architecture, which implies breaking down the software into independent components called modules.
Microservices are one example of this architectural approach. In a microservices architecture, each service is responsible for a separate function and works independently without affecting other services and their functionality. This approach simplifies adding new modules and functionality to the software, which means the application can scale more efficiently and quickly.
Host a Custom Solution in the Cloud
Choosing between on-premises and cloud hosting can also impact the ability of your custom software to evolve and expand in the future, so you need to select the deployment option carefully. Although on-premises hosting has its advantages (in particular, it can give a company more control over the data processed by its software), cloud deployment allows for advanced flexibility and scalability, increasing software efficiency and lifespan.
With cloud hosting, your solution is not maintained on a single physical server but on multiple cloud servers that operate together. If you need to scale your solution as user or data volumes grow, you can simply increase the storage and computing capacity of a cloud server on demand. In addition, you can distribute the load across multiple servers, thereby ensuring stable software performance and availability.
Focus on Code Quality
If the underlying code is poorly written and difficult to maintain, your custom software may suffer from limited scalability. Because poor-quality code can be complex to modify and update, if you want to upgrade the solution in the future, you will most likely have to spend lots of time and resources on code refactoring.
Developers can adhere to some best practices to make the code more maintainable and future-proof. For example, they can strictly follow general coding guidelines or the ones approved by a company to ensure its code uniformity, making it more understandable and easier to modify. In addition, developers should strive to minimize code duplication, which can help mitigate potential inconsistencies within code. Among other things, developers should aim to optimize existing code by using techniques such as constant folding or loop optimization.
Prioritize Scalability Testing
Scalability testing focuses on verifying the ability of a custom solution to scale and operate stably despite increasing workload. By using tools such as LoadRunner or Gatling, testers can check whether the company’s software can handle an increased number of users, data or transactions seamlessly.
In practice, scalability testing allows engineers to evaluate the system’s performance under stressful conditions and determine whether there are issues and bugs affecting user experience. After running scalability tests and analyzing their results, developer teams can eliminate the inspected issues promptly before the customer solution is launched, when fixing bugs will become more challenging and costly.
Build to Scale
If you want your custom solution to remain efficient in the long run and your technology investments to pay off years ahead, you should prioritize software scalability and flexibility during development. A future-proof custom software can evolve smoothly and be modified seamlessly, as your business requirements change. Designing a modular software architecture, hosting software in the cloud, adhering to code quality standards, and running thorough scalability tests are some ways to future-proof your bespoke solution.
If long-term software success is your top priority, we recommend involving third-party custom developers in your project. Custom software experts can share their expertise and provide any guidance and technical assistance required when building a scalable and flexible custom solution.