8 min, 1,786 words
Summary: Smart use of automation in software development can deliver faster Time to Value – but be sure to use a strategic approach to maximize your team’s human effort and creativity.
- Software development automation is not just for new product launches – it can help modernize and create “timeless software.”
- Implement automation for software development in a way that tackles repetitive processes while giving your team more time for innovation.
- Platform Builder is an automation solution that builds the foundation of your software product faster and at lower cost, accelerating software innovation by 10x.
The pace of software innovation expected by the marketplace keeps increasing, and not just for new products. If your company has built a successful software product, brought it to market, and established a customer base, you still need to keep innovating. Customers’ demands don’t stop. If you want to not only retain your revenues but maximize customer lifetime value (LTV), you have to continuously deliver new value to your customers every 90 days.
Using AI automation in software development can help you keep innovating for the long term. But you have to be smart about how to implement automation in a way that helps you build software right, build it fast, and build it to last.
Let’s look at a few of the biggest benefits of automation in software development, and how your technology team can integrate automation to maximize value creation – and reduce Time to Value.
Benefit #1: Automating Software Development Tackles Repetitive Processes
The best strategy for using automation in software development is to take a focused approach to software automation. Commit to automating the repetitive parts of the software construction process that are best suited to rules-based AI and automation. Just like building a physical product at a factory: if you need to weld the same two pieces together over and over again, or insert the same 14 screws in the same spots, those are great tasks for a robot. But for certain complex operations on the factory floor or creative inputs into the software development process, AI and robots aren’t good enough. You need people.
Use AI and automation to do what machines do best. But don’t assume that automation can do everything that humans do best. A common mistake that some software company leaders make is believing that AI and automation can replace all skilled labor. Now with AI becoming all the buzz, some software company investors or board members might believe that “ChatGPT is gonna build my software for me.” No!
Can generative AI help your engineering team deliver more software faster? Yes.
But is AI going to build a commercially viable, stable, scalable, profitable, serviceable software product for you? No!
Remember – every commercially viable software product needs to have these four components. Your software product must be:
- Stable: If not, you’ve got nothing to sell.
- Scalable: If you can’t sell and bring on new customers as fast as you need to… the product will fail.
- Profitable: Ramping up new customers cannot cost you money. You have to monitor the operating expenses and management costs upfront.
- Serviceable: If it’s not serviceable, you’ll have to rebuild it. When are you going to find time to do that? And if you don’t solve the serviceability upfront, you can’t innovate quickly enough. You won’t be able to bring net new value to your customers fast enough to keep up with growing demand once that first version is out.
No generative AI tool can crank out commercially viable software products that cover all these bases. So don’t make the mistake of trying to use automation for every aspect of software development. Just like in the world of manufacturing, you’re not going to be successful in replacing all of your skilled people with robots. Companies throughout recent history have tried this; Elon Musk had to scrap hundreds of millions of dollars of robotic hardware on the Tesla factory floor because they discovered that there are some things that people do better.
It’s great that software companies are embracing automation. It’s valuable to add automation to the software development mix to stay ahead of the competition. But be smart about it. You can’t afford to take years to build a product, you have months. Generative AI won’t do it all for you.
Benefit #2: AI Automation in Software Engineering Reduces Errors and Improves Product Stability
AI is here to stay. And rules-based AI for software development has the potential to create massive value.
Rules-based AI uses pre-written rules and if/then statements to make decisions and solve problems based on encoded human knowledge. But rules-based AI for software development works best when it’s focused on automating the areas that are most error-prone and repetitive. Use AI automation to free up your team for human effort and creativity.
With a smart usage of AI in software engineering, your software team can use their time for:
- Software architecture
- Product design
- Improving the user experience
- Adding features and software components that your users value
Automation in software development can help ensure consistent quality and give you solid structures in your platform. Be realistic about what makes sense to automate and what doesn’t. Striking the right balance of automation vs. human construction will help you establish a strong foundation and maintain the integrity of the product you’re building. It brings the benefits of automation while managing risks and potential downsides. That’s how you maximize value creation for your customers and your shareholders.
Benefit #3: Automate Your Software Platform, Accelerate Innovation
Not all AI and automation in software development are equally effective. People have been trying to automate software development since the 1960s. Even before ChatGPT, there were several attempts over the years by companies like Microsoft, where the vision was “We should never have to write code again. We should have a magical design thing where you push a button and out comes a completely finished software product, all ready to go.”
Here’s the problem with this kind of magical thinking about AI in software engineering: ChatGPT isn’t gonna save you. With generative AI for software coding, to truly create value for software companies and your customers, the AI needs excellent architecture and plumbing to feed its data correctly and accurately. That software “plumbing” and infrastructure is ripe for automation. But it doesn’t create a viable software product all by itself.
Modularis has been working on software automation for decades, and this is what our Platform BuilderSM solution can help accomplish. Platform Builder builds upon our PlatformPlus® technology to generate your entire platform for you. This is a massive portion of what you need to build, and it gives you all the structures so your software engineers and software developers can focus on what really matters. With Platform Builder, you can accelerate software innovation by 10x without rewriting your product – because your software team can spend less time on maintenance and fixing bugs, and focus 80% (or more) of their time on innovation!
Benefit #4: Automating Software Development Can Create “Timeless Software”
Every software company wants to move fast and get products to market. Automating software development can help speed up time to market – but remember, “time to market” is not always the most important metric. Instead, focus on “Time to Value.” You want to focus, at every step of the software development process, on creating value for the customer. And automation used improperly can create negative value.
By leveraging automation for software development in the right way, you can build and add to your product, delivering incremental value and driving revenue, quarter by quarter. Just like building a house: smart software automation should build the foundation first, and then build layers upon that. With a good foundation and a smart approach to incremental software modernization, your software products will be more likely to keep customers happy for a long time and maximize LTV by delivering value steadily, over and over again.
At Modularis, our approach to software automation from the beginning was to embrace automation, but use 3GL (3rd generation languages) like JavaScript, and keep everything open, not a proprietary black box. We didn’t want to take control away from professional software engineers and architects. But by using automation in this smart, targeted way, we’ve helped our clients keep their software products updated, scalable, profitable, and serviceable while launching value-adding new features and generating net new revenue.
“Timeless software” really is possible. And we make it happen with software platform automation.
How to Achieve Faster “Time to Value”
Automating software development has huge potential to generate value for customers and boost productivity in our industry. But implementing software automation is not just about technology. It’s about finding the right technology partner to guide you in how to use software automation to your company’s best advantage.
At Modularis, we use automation smartly as part of a larger, disciplined, rigorous software engineering approach. We embrace automation not just for “getting to market” but for maintaining and modernizing a product over time to maximize LTV.
Automation in software development is not just about “let’s crank out a bunch of new stuff really fast!” Your priority should not be Time to Market, it should be Time to Value.
Every automated software development project still needs to achieve the four key components of a successful, commercially viable software product.
Your software product needs to be stable, scalable, profitable, and serviceable.
Time to Value means: you can achieve all four of these components to really deliver value to your customers and shareholders. Anything less, and you might just be lighting money on fire.
Achieving faster Time to Value is a much bigger project than simply “adding automation.” You need a team approach and software engineering discipline. Along with the execution of the product, you need to ask and answer:
- Do you know what value your customers need?
- Do you have a financial model that’s going to work in your target market segment?
- Are you ready with packaging, delivery, and support?
- Have you timed the offer correctly, do you know which feature sets need to be delivered first, second, and third to maximize your revenue opportunity and your R&D dollars? Building X before Y can make a massive difference in overall cost, risk, and Time to Value.
All of these questions take time. You need to work with the right technology partner to do the homework upfront, get a technology roadmap, and get solid pricing, licensing, and a financial model.
What does it look like when the right team is in place and the right approach to smart automation for software development is underway? The other day, I was texting a client about a new product launch, and he asked me if I was happy with where things stood in the project timeline. I wrote back: “Yes, I am. We are on track, and the hammer is fully down. The right things are being done by the right people in the right order. And it shall remain so.”
Automating software development is not just about pushing a button and a magical product pops out. It’s about implementing the right processes and actions with the right people in the right order. Your team has to find a way to get there. You need a team that can make that happen and leverage AI and automation for software engineering. That smart approach to automation, combined with disciplined software engineering, will unlock the biggest benefits of all.