Not too long ago, when you think of custom software development, a cloud of gloom almost instantly appear above you. Whether you’re a startup founder or a head of enterprise innovation or digital transformation, you’d think, “I need A LOT of money to get this done” or “I don’t have coding skills, this is an impossible undertaking.”
These days, building your own app is a little easier, and there’s a handful of options for you to choose from. Some of them address the concerns above and actually get your project done within your budget and timeline. (we’ll get to that in Step 2).
This article serves as a guide for you, outlining 10 steps on how to build a custom software.
It’s very important to have a well-defined and well-planned project, because this is the foundation of your software.
Establish goals to act as a north star (or north stars) to align all your activities throughout the development process. For example: during the design phase, you can ask yourself: is this feature going to contribute in achieving my goals?
It helps to start with your vision and mission. Basically, your vision is the future that you see with people using your software. Your mission is what you intend to do to make that vision a reality. Afterwards, create SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) for your business.
This first series of sub-steps in planning your project are quite inward-looking or self-centric, so afterwards you’ll need to look outwards and write down problem statements.
At the end of the day, your software idea should exist to solve an existing problem. Without a well-defined problem, your software will run the risk of not solving anything. And that is essentially a death toll for your startup or your DX initiative. Writing a problem statement involves the following:
At that fifth item, you don’t necessarily need to write down features but just a simplified answer of what your software will do to address the market or end-user’s problems much better than whatever is out there for them.
Now that you have a solid project plan in place for your software, the next question is: how do I build it?
When you decide how to go about creating a software, you think about your resources, the size of your company, and the purpose of the software.
Here’s a quick view of the differences between the top options for building custom software:
(alternative text when the other article is up - This article discusses the options at length, but to summarize, here’s a table for you:)
We’re not going to shy away from saying that Xamun is the best approach in creating custom software, and here’s why:
Xamun is an all-in-one platform, covering everything that takes place across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). It provides the speed of no-code app builders (with a little help from AI and bots) and the unlimited customizability, code ownership, and ease (through managed services) of working dev agencies PLUS it fits your timeline and budget.
Anyone – whether you’re a non-technical startup founder or a tech executive in a large enterprise – can get their software built no matter its complexity.
At this point, you have probably decided which approach to take. The rest of the steps we will be discussing in this article will be for those who seek to build a software through Xamun.
Setting the features (or modules & pages) of your software is the initial step in designing it. This determines the major things your end-users can do with your app and it’s the basis for all the finer details that you will set in succeeding steps.
This step has two possible starting points in Xamun’s Design Studio:
Our Solution Library is a great way to start your design because oftentimes what we want to build is an iteration or an improved version of an existing solution. The library has some of the more popular solutions out there, such as loans customer portal and inventory management. By starting with a template, you already cover about 90% of what you need and all you need to do is customize it further.
While our Solution Library is continuously growing, you might need something more unique. Here’s where Xami, our AI consultant, comes in. With Xami, you simply ask a question (based on what you want to build) and it will provide you with helpful module suggestions that you can easily add to your solution. If these modules and pages are already existing in our library, page designs will be automatically added.
In this step, you can also easily manually add/remove modules and pages to really match what you want to build
This step may require you to tap your in-house designer, but basically you have the freedom to further customize your app’s design using Figma, a universally-popular app design and prototyping tool.
All you need to do is download the Figma file (which already has some pre-made pages based on whichever modules from our library you’ve added) and directly edit the file before uploading it back to Xamun.
SIDE NOTE: If you join our MVP Program, you can tap our design team to help you with this step.
At this point, what you have achieved is your software’s UI (user interface) or what the end-user will see. However, software design involves more than the look-and-feel. You also have to design the UX (user experience). This is where business rules come in, also found inside the Design Studio. This major step has 5 sub-steps:
In software development, a user story is an informal description of features. It basically tells what a user intends to do in a given module. For example, in a customer portal, you can write something like “Customer creates an account.” Typically written on a post-it, what Xamun does is it lets you write the user stories in a more organized way.
A test case is related to a user story, but it is rather more technical and takes into account how the software should behave in relation to what a user does. Used by software testers/QA engineers, a test case documents the different actions performed in your software to determine if it meets your requirements and you can say it functions correctly. For example, a test case can be written like “If required fields in the account creation form are unfilled, when the user clicks on SUBMIT, it shows an error message and prompts the user to fill out the missing information”.
These two sub-steps may take some time to write if you have a fairly complex software with multiple user types. However, we make it much easier through Xami, who can automatically generate user stories and test cases for you. All you need to do is review and refine them, to fit your requirements.
Setting calculations and integrations lets you further define what goes into a specific user story in a specific page. This is where you take into account other functionalities of your software that do not directly involve the end-user, except for maybe them entering the necessary information for the software to process. Xamun has a growing list of pre-built integrations that you can easily connect to popular software in the market via an API key. This step becomes very important in the build process later on, because it will play a big role in how your software will behave – especially if your software is, by nature, connected to other existing systems.
Mapping pages back to user stories and setting page flows further refines your design, by basically letting you set which pages your end-user will see and in what order. This is the last two sub-steps that round up the design process.
While steps 3-5 may feel like a lot, this is the kind of work necessary for you to have a solid design that tightly matches your requirements. Without these steps, you run the risk of doing a whole lot of back-and-forth with the development team which will lead to delays and scope creep.
In Xamun, we take a design-first approach in building software to address these big challenges and ensure a much faster development time.
Once you’ve set your design in steps 3-5, you instantly get an estimate of how much your software will cost you through our Cost Estimator.
When you take the no-code approach, you pay a monthly subscription (for the editor) and some form of usage-based fees. Freelancers and development agencies charge on a time-and-material basis, which can be very challenging when you want a clear answer on how much your project will cost.
What makes Xamun different is it can provide you with a fixed price estimate based on the design that you made, letting you plan your budget accordingly and guaranteeing that there will be no surprise fees later.
Do take note that at this point, what the Cost Estimator provides you is an estimate. If you need a formal proposal, you simply request the Xamun Team to give you one through the Project Hub. The proposal is essentially the customer agreement, that you will review and sign – and this is already a binding contract.
Don’t fret, the proposal is not extremely different to the cost estimate but it does take into account a lot of factors that may not have been considered by our Cost Estimator.
Signing the proposal and settling the downpayment will trigger the activation of your project. At this point, the Xamun Team will get in touch with you to brief you about the next steps, and introduce you to our Build Partner (which we thoroughly vetted and trained on Xamun’s Build Studio) who will build your software.
For the most part, in this step, you will be using the Project Hub mainly to monitor the progress of your project.
The Project Hub also features a discussion thread to let you collaborate faster and better with the Build Partner. The Build Partner will also set regular catch-up calls with you to further discuss the progress of the project and get some clarifications if needed.
Do take note that there will be a series of payments that need to be made throughout the build phase, which is milestone-based.
The Project Hub also lets you access the sandbox, which is essentially a version of your software that you can test. This step in software development is called user-acceptance testing, where you (or your end-user) can try using the software that has been built so far. This lets you get a clear idea of the end-result and gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the Build Partner if something isn’t working correctly from an end-user’s perspective.
Do take note that other than user-acceptance testing, Xamun has automated unit testing (which is typically performed by software engineers) as well as a number of testing activities (such as functional, performance, compatibility, and usability testing) that the Build Partner’s QA testers will perform all throughout the build phase.
After you’ve performed the user-acceptance testing and settled the final payment, you’re ready to launch your app.
Whether you’re building a web app (for web browsers on your laptop/desktop) or a mobile app (for iOS, Android, or both), the Build Partner will assist you in the process of deploying the web app to the live environment/production server and/or uploading your mobile app to any of the app stores (Apple App Store or Google Play).
At this point, you will also need to do a bit of marketing outside of the scope of what Xamun does, to invite your end-users to download your mobile app or sign up for an account on their web browser, whichever is applicable. Listing on app stores include preparing descriptions and screenshots and app icons, which you can read up more here for Apple App Store and here for Google Play. You may also look into listing on directory sites like Capterra and G2 to reach the right customers for your software.
Building an app is not a “set it and forget it” thing. As you get more feedback from your customers/end-users and as mobile OS gets updated, you will need to continuously enhance and maintain your software. There’s a bunch of work that goes into app maintenance, such as database maintenance, cosmetic maintenance, and compliance maintenance. Also, while there’s a comprehensive amount of testing done while your software is being built, there might still be some bugs and issues that will be discovered while your software is used by your end-users.
It is therefore imperative that you take into account the cost of maintenance work when you’re planning/trying to seek approval for your budget, whether from your board or whoever is funding your project. Xamun offers a maintenance add-on that is performed by our Build Partner so you don’t have to worry about who’s performing the maintenance work.
In addition, with Xamun, enhancing existing features or adding new features is made easier. All you need to do is go back to the Design Studio and add the new features into the design. Generally, adding new features will also mean that the additional work in the build phase would only involve these new features.
While the process we discussed above are related to using Xamun, the individual steps are, in principle the same steps you will go through when creating your own app. Do remember that developing a custom software is complex by nature, because software IS complex.
The great news is: platforms like Xamun are constantly innovating, trying to make the entire process simpler, less risky, and much faster for enterprise innovators and startup founders like you who may not have a team (or a big enough team) to bring custom software to market on time, on spec, and on budget. Now there’s no reason for you to hold back on that digital business idea that’s been living in your head for some time now. Go and start building!
Feel free to book a call with the Xamun team to learn more on how we can help you bring your digital business ideas to life, or you can go ahead and sign up for our MVP Program and launch your Minimum Viable Product in as fast as 6 WEEKS.
Xamun helps unlock innovation with the power of AI. Combined with automation and experts, Xamun seeks to make custom software development faster and better! We are changing the way software is built so that your vision gets turned into reality – without your tech know-how and budget holding you back!
