There is a moment in running a software business when you realize product development is too slow. Slow development is too costly to support sustainable growth. After all, time is money. You need a solution that will help you speed up the process and get a better ROI.
PlatformPlus will help reduce your software development costs using proven methods that combine automation with pre-built components + heavy-lift software engineers + senior leadership. This is NOT about outsourcing. It’s about helping your existing team get the job done quicker, and with exceptional ROI.
How PlatformPlus® Reduces Software Development Costs
The first step in the adoption of PlatformPlus® is a three-day discovery session that works to align business needs with software development milestones. These three days help us get an understanding of WHY your executive team is looking for a new solution. What are you trying to solve? What objectives are you trying to hit? The three-day process looks like this:
Day 1: Understanding Business Plan & Objectives
Traditional software development tends to skip directly to digital transformation, without an understanding of the motivation and goals behind your decision. Simply telling your developers that you need to “get on the cloud” doesn’t provide the clear requirements tied to business objectives that will get your software developed right the first time. Unclear requirements result in revision after revision, which drives up the cost of your software development.
This first day of discovery provides insight into your executive perspective that we can translate into business milestones, goals, and objectives covering a 12 to 18-month timeframe. Aligning software development goals with business milestones means that every line of code is tied to a strategic business objective, resulting in less wasted time, purpose-driven goals, and a quicker path to net new revenue.
Day 2: What Assets & Software Do You Have?
Once we understand where you want to go, we move to the second day and take inventory of what resources you have. This is the starting point on your technology roadmap – the “you are here” moment. Now, we want to do a deeper dive into your assets and determine:
- What technologies are you currently using?
- What are the capabilities of your current developer bench?
- What are the gaps between what you have and what you need?
This is where PlatformPlus® shines – instead of trying to buy tech and hire new developers, engineers, and architects to fill these gaps, the team and tech at Modularis fit in seamlessly to fill the gaps.
Day 3: Where Do You Want to Be & When?
Dates matter! With Modularis, delivery dates are real. We aren’t interested in meaningless dates that developers can’t hit and that the executive team knows they won’t. We don’t believe in fudge factors. Put simply, we believe you should be able to hold us and your software development team accountable for hitting meaningful dates.
We will help you set 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals to get your software product released to market. Then we will help you set quarterly milestones for refinement and new feature additions, followed by long-term 12 to 18-month milestones. Every milestone is tied to code, and every line of code is tied to the business objective it’s meant to achieve.
The result of this three-day investment is your Technology Roadmap, a high-level plan that will keep everyone on point, operating efficiently, and in line with business objectives that will help your company be more competitive. Without this clear vision and a set plan, your developers are likely to find themselves wasting time on unclear requirements that don’t truly solve for business needs. Time is money, and the time you save with PlatformPlus® will ultimately translate into ROI.
What Processes Get Automated in PlatformPlus?
PlatformPlus includes advanced automation tools to speed up software development itself, not just the surrounding QA, CI/CD processes, etc. The truth is that only 20% of the code you’re writing today delivers any real value to your customers. The other 80% is the plumbing/infrastructure that holds up that 20%. It’s needed, has to be done right, and it’s the source of most of your lost time and development spent.
It’s exactly that boring (but critical!) plumbing code that we’ve fully automated. This lets your human developers focus all their passion and creativity on the problems that matter the most to your customers, and the features and capabilities that will give your business maximum lift.
Plumbing Code: Pre-Built Components & Model-Driven Automation
Modularis has spent the last 22 years figuring out the basic functions that every commercial software platform and product needs to have. We have taken this knowledge and packaged it into two major accelerator components: pre-built libraries that are fundamental to every commercial-grade product or platform, and model-driven automation that generates vast swaths of code that are very specific to your underlying data, business, and market.
The bottom line is that all code you would otherwise have to write yourself is fully automated with PlatformPlus. This inherently clean, modular, and well-architected “plumbing” code is exactly what gives you a solid foundation to build upon. It enables your developers to spend all their time innovating and working on new features that will unlock new revenue streams.
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Modular Architecture
Everyone has heard of the term “spaghetti code,” and recognizes that this implies code that is hard to understand, difficult to maintain, and not very well thought-out. Yet, unfortunately, this is the default state today for most software teams using traditional means under pressure from management to deliver results. Quick-and-dirty = spaghetti code.
The inherently modular, flexible, and scalable architecture in PlatformPlus is the exact antithesis of spaghetti code.
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First Principles
PlatformPlus is built upon fundamental first principles of good software architecture and engineering that were true 30 years ago and will be true 30 years from now.
When seasoned developers look at PlatformPlus, they often comment that this is the type of platform they’d build themselves if only they had the time to do it. Junior developers embrace it quickly because they’re able to punch far above their weight class when they use it. Senior software engineers embrace it quickly because they realize that they can trust it and that it lets them focus on the most interesting and valuable challenges rather than plumbing. Mid-level developers frequently put up an initial resistance because it represents quite a change for them, but a few weeks in, they always come around.
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An Alternative to Hiring or Outsourcing
In traditional software development, when you need more horsepower, you either hire more developers or outsource development projects. PlatformPlus by contrast gives you a far bigger lift in development velocity, quality, and longevity for the same price as hiring one senior software developer, and for far less than you’d pay a qualified outsourcing outfit.
What can you expect from PlatformPlus?
The combination of the battle-tested runtime components in PlatformPlus and its advanced model-driven automation tools remove a huge amount of work from your developers’ plates, letting them focus their efforts on innovation rather than maintenance. At every step, they have access to and the support of our software architects and heavy-lift engineers who guide and advise them on how to use PlatformPlus to maximum effect.
In the real world, LiveEdit was able to move its development team off of maintenance tasks and into innovation. Before PlatformPlus®, LiveEdit was spending 80% of its software development time and budget just keeping its software from falling apart. After PlatformPlus, maintenance time/budget was reduced to 20%!
80% of the budget now goes to the development of innovations that unlock new revenue streams.
Building products and platforms on PlatformPlus means that you will have far fewer bugs to deal with – customers report an 80-90% reduction in defects when using PlatformPlus vs. traditional software development.
Plus, Modularis remains responsible and accountable for supporting, fixing, and updating all Modularis runtime components and tooling, ensuring that the uplift in speed and quality you receive will be long-lasting.
Why Choose PlatformPlus?
There are three possible paths you can choose to build your software products, each having different long-term outcomes:
Traditional Development
You build 100% of the code yourself, relying on nothing but what the big players give you (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc.).
- % of code you have to build: 100%
- % of code you have to maintain: 100%
- Tech leadership provided by: You
- Support provided by: You
- Who’s accountable: You
The Open Source Hodgepodge
You can cobble together a mix of different open-source frameworks and glue everything together.
- % of code you have to build: 50%
- % of code you have to maintain: 100%
- Tech leadership provided by: You
- Support provided by: Open-source communities
- Who’s accountable: You
PlatformPlus
You can use PlatformPlus and get powerful tools, experienced support, bulletproof, modular code, and leadership with decades of experience.
- % of code you have to build: 20%
- % of code you have to maintain: 20%
- Tech leadership provided by: Modularis + You
- Support provided by: Modularis + You
- Who’s accountable: Modularis + You
Go with the experts, and let Modularis and PlatformPlus® give you the lift you need and deserve.
Get software development to a better place in record time with PlatformPlus
Combine the powerful automation tools and pre-built components inside PlatformPlus with heavy-lift engineering and leadership talent to help your existing team get the job done. Spend 10 minutes with A.J. to learn more.