Time to Market Vs Quality
An eCommerce company got their entire portal developed through some freelancers and tested and deployed the same. The portal worked well for a week, but then it started slowing down until it finally crashed. Reasons for the crash were unknown to the company and the freelancers who developed it. It took us a two-week study to identify the software code issues and the WebApp Server configuration issues. Post that, the portal was up and live again and restored the business volumes.
It is pretty often that business requirements necessitate rapid development and deployment and usually, there are calculated risks taken to enable the launch. When these risks are related to security, scalability, configuration, audit tracking or others, there might be no mitigation plan to review the code and fix the issue.
So the question that arises is, what is more important? Time to Market or the Quality of the Code. We often discuss this point with the customers who come to us with these challenges. And more often than not, it just turns out that the basics cited above are compromised as calculated risks.
On an ongoing basis, when things are going well and the rubber has already hit the road, software upgrades and patches are not done in time which might again impact the software’s uptime and the business.