What’s the process behind receiving a quote for a new feature?
When you need a bespoke new feature in your software to further optimise your business processes, remove specific bottlenecks and challenges you face, and make your business more efficient and lucrative, it may be hard to understand what costs to expect. Meanwhile, budget is always a big element to consider when deciding what solution to go with and who should build it for you.
In this blog, we give you a sneak peak behind the scenes of how we at The Beaverhead calculate estimations to prepare your quotes.
Every requirement you have travels a complex road before it reaches your screen as functionality. The journey can be divided into three stages:
- Ideation and planning
- Development and testing
- Deployment and maintenance
In this post, we are focusing on the ideation and planning stage. That’s the stage where we help you figure out what is required to most efficiently resolve your challenges and grow your business. We also look into the business impact of the new requirement. Finally, we provide your quote and wait for it to be approved.
In order to understand every aspect of the feature you need and the impact it would have on any existing software, we go through a checklist, which generally includes the following considerations:
- Check whether the requirement has been implemented before. It’s worth a check, as the functionality you need may already exist but be turned off for some reason, or it may just need to be slightly modified for your purposes.
- Determine what modules of the software it applies to. We need to gauge how big the impact is, and naturally - the greater the impact, the greater the effort will be to deliver the requirement.
- Scope the feature and verify it with existing documentation. This is where we identify any possible edge cases, and we take the time to work with you and really understand the impact on application and business logic.
- Consult with internal experts and team leaders about the delivery time. This helps us set a timeline and manage our team’s hours.
As we work through this checklist, we will often schedule consultations with your business, in order to ensure that we are preparing the most optimised and effective solution for your exact needs. Any feedback is fed straight into the process, and there is back and forth communication to ensure everybody is on the same page.
Once we are happy with all the items in the above list, we are ready to pull together an accurate quote for your new features.
We hope this gives you an idea of what to expect if you are considering growing or improving your software solutions. If you’d like to better understand what we can do for you and how we can help, please don’t hesitate to contact us here!
