Your guide to custom software engineering
In today’s fast-paced landscape, business leaders are becoming quite dependent on technology, in particular custom-designed applications to adapt to changing market dynamics.
Business leaders are moving towards integrating customized solutions to accommodate individual objectives. With efficiency unattainable through off-the-shelf solutions, custom-designed applications are transforming critical operations, thereby ensuring market competitiveness.
What’s custom software engineering?
Custom engineering is an all-encompassing process, which covers every stage from discovery to deployment. Preliminary research, requirement gathering and analysis, design, engineering, quality assurance, and launch – the process extends beyond off-the-shelf implementation, thereby ensuring greater personalization.
Bespoke engineering emphasizes individualization to satisfy unique audiences, dynamics, objectives, and more. By enabling data analysis, system security and privacy, flexibility, scalability, and overall business productivity, the approach is being actively applied across industries – healthcare, retail, finance, construction, and others.
Market overview & drivers
As stated by Grand View Research:
- The custom software development market volume has reached $35.42 billion in 2023
- The global market magnitude is expected to range $43.16 billion in 2024 and over $146 billion by 2030, benefiting custom software development companies in the USA
Among other influential factors, the custom software development market expansion is driven by automation. Data-driven decision-making, standardized operations, increased efficiency, decreased expenses, and others – these push business leaders towards customized software development and automation.
And back to Grand View Research, with 61.4% market portion, large enterprises are dominating the segment. On the one side, forward-looking enterprises are going for customization for accelerated market advantage, one the other side – business leaders are opting for streamline security measures.
As reported by Statista, over 2023, the spending on enterprise software amounted to trimming $913 billion. The drivers are wrapping digital reformation, in particular cloud adoption, data analytics, business automation, and, naturally, regulatory compliance.
Comparing custom vs off-the-shelf software integration
| Custom software | Off-the-shelf software | |
| Cost | Custom software typically requires a higher initial investment but proves more cost-effective in the long run | Off-the-shelf software often requires a lower upfront investment, but expenses may arise from licensing and customization |
| Time | Custom products can take more time in development and deployment as they are built from scratch | Off-the-shelf applications are available for utilization right away, only taking some time for installation and configuration |
| Functionality | Tailor-made solutions are designed to provide unique capabilities mostly unavailable to competitors that utilize off-the-shelf products | Ready-made solutions are accessible to anyone, including competitors, and provide standard functionality |
| Integration | Customized solutions are designed to be seamlessly integrated into already existing systems | Generic solutions may require additional resources to be successfully integrated with systems |
| Scalability | Are built with scalability in mind, thus allowing for modification and expansion to meet evolving needs | Are limited in terms of scalability, thereby challenging the adaptation to changing business requirements |
| Risk | Lower risk of potential system conflicts, security and compatibility issues, and more | Higher risk of potential system conflicts, security and compatibility issues, and more |
| Maintenance | Such solutions typically require ongoing maintenance and support | These solutions usually include vendor updates and patches |
| Control | With a custom product, business leaders have much more control over functionality, thus minimizing their dependency on providers | With an off-the-shelf application, business leaders and employees are dependent on the software provider for support, updates, patches, and features |
Understanding custom software engineering: the process
Requirement gathering and analysis
In this discovery phase, the team works closely with stakeholders to understand and document the objectives. This includes preliminary interviews, additional questionnaires, feasibility analysis, requirement prioritization, and prototyping.
Project planning
At the next stage, the team outlines everything from scope, budget, timeline, and resources to responsibilities. This involves milestone definition, risk planning, quality assurance criteria establishment, project scheduling, and other preparatory activities.
Software design
Moving further, in the software design project stage, the efforts are shifted towards meeting the requirements. That’s when the engineers are covering system architecture, user interface, modules, components, and more, jointly handling stakeholder reviews, regulatory compliance, and more.
Software engineering
And then there’s actual software engineering – writing code, integrating modules and components, and more. During this project stage, the involved software engineers are handling database configuration, version control, and other essential processes.
Thorough testing
This stage’s main purpose is ensuring the product is meeting specified requirements and functions as expected. That includes unit testing, integration and system testing, performance testing, bug tracking and reporting, regression testing, and others.
Product deployment
In the next stage, the product is deployed to the production environments to be finally exploited by end-users. That involves data migration, system integration, performance monitoring, rollback planning, and validation, and precedes ongoing support and maintenance.
Potential applications across industries
| The application | The benefits | |
| Healthcare | – Telemedicine platforms – Clinical decision support systems – Hospital management – Pharmacy management – Patient management portals – Patient monitoring systems – Medical imaging and diagnostic – Medical billing and coding | – Improved operational efficiency – Enhanced patient care – Increased diagnostic accuracy – Reduced administrative burden – Greater patient engagement – Personalized patient experience – Improved flexibility and scalability – Enhanced security and privacy |
| Retail | – ERP & CRM platforms – eCommerce platforms – POS systems – Analytics and reporting systems – Inventory management – Store management – Supply chain management – Loyalty program management | – Personalized marketing – Personalized recommendations – Increased sales – Reduced error – Improved inventory management – Enhanced customer experience – Automated billing and invoicing – Real-time tracking and insights |
| Finance | – Banking platforms – Trading platforms – Electronic payment systems – KYC verification services – Smart contracts – Credit scoring – Payment processing systems – Investment management systems | – Data-driven pricing – Portfolio optimization – Personalized financial products – Streamlined transaction processing – Straightforward reconciliation – Letter of credit automation – Risk assessment and management – Fraud detection and prevention |
| Construction | – Rental and booking platforms – Tenant and resident portals – Property listings & marketplaces – Tech-enabled brokerage – Client-contractor communication – Quality control – Document management – Inventory management | – Improved data accuracy – Enhanced document management – Better budget tracking – Smarter resource allocation – Optimized scheduling – Customized reporting – Data-driven risk management – Real-time project monitoring |
Choosing custom software engineering: the benefits
Data management
By integrating custom software, you improve data integration, analysis, storage, backup, recovery, and security. And the additional opportunities might include role-based access, data encryption, version control, audit trails, and seamless data synchronization across platforms.
Business productivity
By using custom software, you enhance routine workflows, resource allocation, tracking, reporting, and more. And even greater performance can be achieved through integrated communication, real-time collaboration, and other advanced features.
Increased scalability
Generic solutions might present performance bottlenecks, capacity constraints, and inefficient load balancing. Customized software, in contrast, can provide on-demand auto-scaling, modular and component-based design, load balancing, distributed architecture, and more.
Enhanced security
General-purpose solutions might cause various vulnerabilities – data breaches, malicious injections, and others. Personalized software, on the other hand, can offer custom access and permissions, role-based authentication, logging, monitoring, and other security measures to prevent potential damage.
Custom software real-world examples
A custom-built telemedicine platform
Abto Software has entered a partnership with a healthcare provider to build a custom telemedicine platform. The objective was designing an easy-to-navigate telemedicine solution to optimize doctor-patient interaction during the coronavirus pandemic.
We covered UI/UX design, POC and MVP creation, third-party integration, quality assurance, and deployment. To enable operational efficiency, we provided user profiles, role-based dashboards, appointment management, private chats, audio and video calls, and other custom features.
To learn more about the project, read the case study: a custom telemedicine platform.
A tailor-made NFT marketplace
Abto Software has entered into cooperation with an ecommerce startup to deliver a custom NFT marketplace. The goal was designing an unprecedented NFT marketplace to allow digital creators to search and purchase digital collectibles.
We covered the design of a single-page application, API implementation, and setup of the AWS environment. To meet the determined business requirements, we provided an intuitive user interface, image & video upload, Smart Contracts, Flow Contracts, Ethereum Contracts, and Terraform code infrastructure.
To learn more about the project, read the case study: a custom NFT marketplace within the Web3 industry.
How we can help
Abto Software, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is your strategic partner to deliver enterprise-level products. Preliminary discovery, requirement documentation, design, engineering, quality assurance, and deployment – our company can handle every stage.
To enable data-driven insights and decision-making, increase efficiency, decrease challenges, and more – contact custom software developers who possess domain-specific knowledge and experience.
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