Since the inclusion of personal computers, internet and smartphones, we have seen a number of software products which are developed to make life easier, comfortable and faster.
Software products, those really help mankind, gradually become part of day to day life. They do not just only remain a product but become a culture and habit. There are a number of examples like MS Word, MS Excel, Whatsapp, Facebook, Emails, Google Search & Google Maps, which are now filling up a large part of our life. Not only well known software products, but there are also many small software products which make our day to day life easier and hence become a part of life.
Thousands of software products immerse into the market every week but very few of them make themselves sustain and gradually become a household to mankind. Many established products too sometimes gradually get replaced by updated products. So what are the key factors which make a software product blockbuster and sustain in neck to neck competition of modern day culture?
Majority of the experts would advise that user interface and user experience are the key to a blockbuster product. I too agree on a certain extent, but not fully! In my opinion, a successful product can not exist without 2 things:
- Documentation
- Quality Assurance
Surprised? Let us explore…
While software companies pay the majority of their attention and stay focused on software development, documentation and quality assurance are 2 important aspects which are usually ignored. This finally results in product failure to sustain in market for long term. Let us see in detail.
- Documentation
A good product includes multiple stakeholders and documentation is a vital thing which connects everyone with the product uniformly. There are various kinds of documentation a product would need. Here are some of them with their importance for product success.
- Project documentation
This includes project relevant documents like requirement analysis, project milestones, deliverables, processes, bug reports, marketing reports, product performance reports and many more. Proper project documentation keeps everyone in the team informed and aligned with their goals with respect to project development. A better project documentation makes it easier to transfer knowledge among teams for their respective work. Skills are very important, but only a well aligned and informed team can drive the project to success. Hence comprehensive project documentation is an inevitable need of any project.
- Software documentation
This includes software relevant documents like flow diagrams, software architecture, database architecture, pseudo code, code comments and algorithm documentation. Software developers are the costliest resources for any software company and to utilize their skills in the most optimum way is really a basic but very important requirement for any company. Proper software documentation keeps everyone in the team informed with the software details. It makes software easier to manage and expand within less time. It facilitates an easy knowledge transfer and hence team expansion or replacement can be done within a shorter time. A product expansion is not possible if the software is not well documented. Software is like the real asset of the company and its documentation is the key to that asset. Hence each and every part of your software must be well documented if you are eying on expansion and long term existence.
- Product documentation
This includes product relevant documents like user manual, user guide, product flow documents, module details, FAQs and features description. The users of the product are a major stakeholder. Unless the users are well informed about the product features and how those features work, the product will never be used to its optimum potential and will never sustain in the market. A good product supported with useful product documentation builds user confidence and trust as well. It makes the user’s life easier and hence the product gradually gets acceptance in day to day affairs. This finally builds a loyal user-base which is key to the product’s success.
- Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance plays a major role in any product’s success. Even a product with good features and nice UI / UX is prone to failure if its quality is not assured. A product with frequent bugs and failures loses the user trust and visits gradually and hence loses the user base to sustain in the market. A product that runs properly without any bugs makes user life easier and smoother and gets trusted user base gradually.
There are many kinds of Quality Assurances a product can be subjected to. More you test, more you create a good probability of product success. Companies do have their own set of processes for QA like smoke testing, sanity testing, rigorous testing and regression testing. We can find a lot of details on such processes. All these processes are very important. In my opinion though there are 2 testings which mean a lot for the product assurance.
- User Acceptance Testing
User Acceptance Testing is kind of trial run with limited set of users who would use the product end to end and see how smooth and useful it is with respect to the features as well as functionalities, so that any needful corrections and enhancements can be done before the product is actually churned out to the market. Users doing UAT generally consider a software product as a finished one and see whether all the flows are acceptable from a layman’s view. A better UAT can ensure smoother new users onboarding and long term sustained usage. The UAT is usually advised to be done by 3rd Party and sometimes referred to as End User Testing as well.
- Load Testing
If you are aiming for a successful product, you must start looking at bigger picture. The product will have thousands or more concurrent users and the product must run at proper speed without any glitch with those concurrent users. If the product load times are higher or it is showing too many bugs when loaded with many users, the product is more likely to be rejected in the market. Before you churn out the software product on a larger scale, it must be subjected to load testing and its performance must be verified and assured.
I hope the details shared over here provide necessary guidance for those who are building their software product and aiming to make it a blockbuster. Please feel free to contact us at info@menloparkworld.com for any guidance for your product development.
