The challenge of software development

The specification was foolproof - what could go wrong?

Most organisations recognise that IT systems are an indispensable part of life for businesses and large organisations. But why do so many IT projects fail? How do we measure our success or failure?

Most organisations evidently struggle to deliver IT projects to time and budget. Behind this straightforward statement we know that there are many widely understood reasons; too many projects suffer from one or more of the following symptoms:

• Critical requirements found too late in the project cycle and 'scope creep'
• Difficulty in producing reliable estimates
• Problems with securing the right people, at the right time
• Delivery milestones slipped repeatedly
• Difficulty in integrating with other systems
• Unacceptable levels of bugs found during system testing
• High rates of bugs found after implementation
• Reluctant, disillusioned and dissatisfied users
• High ongoing maintenance costs
• Unhelpful system documentation
• Systems that are inflexible in response to business change

While many organisations have made a lot of progress in recent years using project management and project governance standards such as Prince, they still struggle to deliver good IT projects quickly and reliably. Critical aspects of system development remain somewhat of a dark art, elusive and out of reach.

Untangle the muddle of IT Projects

Karona have a straightforward approach to systems development that takes you all the way from defining the business problem to specifying how the code will be constructed, all in a seamless and integrated progression. The process is iterative and incremental. We use UML to explore and communicate the important details at each stage of the project.

• Improve project communication so that every project participant is heard and understood
• Establish ways of working so that everyone can see the part they have to play
• Map out project scope so that the business priorities can be weighed up against the time and resource available, early in the project
• Gain insight into workloads and skill requirements to stabilise resource planning

We have developed a tried and tested approach to software components that has been used to deliver many projects. We also incorporate many good industry practices that we have picked up over the years.

If you follow our process, you will have control over requirements and scope at all stages of the project. You will end up with a well-designed system with useful documentation, which is fully cross-referenceable and traceable to the business requirements. Read more ->

Useful Resources

These links and resources will tell you more about our approach and the techniques we use.

More About Our Approach

If you would like to know more about the kind of development process that we use and recommend, then there are more details here

Contact Us

If you are interested in talking to us about application development, and how your organisation could do it better, please your details and we will do our best to help

Iterative AND Incremental ??? !!!

We have found that other software development approaches are not exactly clear about what they mean by these terms. Some even use them interchangeably! We apply them as follows:

Incremental - is an approach to project development and deployment where the system is built in a number of planned stages. Each increment delivers a chunk of useful, tested functionality.

Iterative - is a way of working. Iterative means not going down to the finest level of detail all in one go. Iteration helps us to validate the broad fit of the deliverable before we delve into the detail.