Your Custom Software is a Continuous Collaborative Project
Keep Your Employees’ Workflow Running Smoothly With Consistent Updates
So you’ve just commissioned your first custom software from Lunarstorm – now what? When you work with Lunarstorm, we listen to all your needs and wish list features, budget, and ideal timeline.
Our team keeps you in the loop at every stage in the process, from the initial conception to the first draft, and then the regular maintenance. A lot of testing happens at each stage, to ensure that the software is in ship-shape and will run without any unexpected bugs. This requires your help!
Our team audits the software before it is presented to you, but the next step is “real world” testing. As the client who will be using the software, Lunarstorm needs your feedback on how easily the software is used on a day-to-day basis. While our team does test the software on its usability, your employees may be using the app in ways that we can’t anticipate. That’s why client feedback is so important to us – we can use that feedback to improve the app’s user-friendliness and make the features as helpful as possible. After all, it’s your custom app, so it should be customized exactly to your liking.
Your phone apps are constantly being updated – sometimes in the background without your active knowledge – and the same should happen for your company’s custom software as well.
No program exists without unexpected issues, and the more users there are, the more opportunities there are for a problem to present itself. We strive to prevent these issues, but realistically, there is still regular maintenance to do to make sure it’s working right.
To avoid surprises or delays in your software development project, regular maintenance should be factored into your budget. This is to ensure that everything continues to work smoothly, without interrupting your workflow. Software updates can often be overlooked, such as security updates, compatibility checks with hardware and other software, updates to the software building framework, testing use on different screen sizes, and more.
Regular maintenance also includes adding new features – after using your software for a while, you may realize that there are other features you would like in order to optimize your workflows (saving you time and money), and there needs to be time to be able to integrate those into your software.
Every few years, there are upgrades for the tools that are used to create software programs. This means that the new tools that are available can be used to create your program can be more efficient moving forward, but that there also needs to be maintenance time factored in to move your current program over to the newly upgraded tools.
For example, if you commissioned a software app in 2012 that hasn’t been upgraded since, it may have trouble running on newer computer systems, or may not even be supported at all. When you realize that you want to add a new service, you now have the challenge of finding a developer who is talented at using the old tools that have been replaced by the new industry standard in 2022, and is able to convert your 2012 program into the 2022 framework, before the upgrades can even begin. That’s why performing regular maintenance of your software is integral to your employee’s workflow, and is likely to be more cost-efficient than waiting 10 years before a big upgrade.
Creating a custom software app is a step in growing your company and maximizing efficiency in your workflow. And just as your company grows and changes, your custom software needs to be updated alongside it.
Trust the experts at Lunarstorm Technologies with your custom software project! Lunarstorm’s service includes project management to help you get organized and on track for maintenance, planning meetings with the team for collaboration, and more. Learn about our workflow here.
