The technology behind a project is as important as the team that develops it. The development arcade is full of fantastic options to choose from and picking the best one is a tricky task. Should one opt for C#, Java, or one of the other time-tested choices? Should you experiment with a new language, or choose to stay with the one that has delivered results to your competitors? MS SQL or MySQL? Windows or Linux? There are certainly a rich set of options available to baffle you.
There might be many who would go with the trending options, or perhaps the option that seems more comfortable/familiar. However, this tendency does not have the potential to serve you in the long run. After all, you need to take care of various aspects of the project that contribute to the quality and ensure its popularity. In this article, we’ll explore one of the most critical components of your software masterpiece, the technology stack.
Before we Begin, What is Technology Stack?
Tech Stack is the compilation of programming languages, tools, and frameworks that are used to build various aspects of a software like front-end, back-end, etc.
Factors Contributing to the Selection of Technology Stacks
1: Time to Market
One of the foremost criteria for choosing the technology stack of a project is Time to Market (TTM). Lesser development time not only decreases the cost of development but also offers multiplied advantages. One such benefit is getting an edge in the market. The faster you develop and deploy the project, sooner you will be able to harness its benefits while staying ahead of your competitors. The technology stack that you choose for your project affects your time to market very closely.
This is how you can reduce the TTM for your project through technology stack:
(i) Out of the Box Solutions: Ensure that the technology stack that you choose for the project offers you built-in solutions to some of the important functionalities for your project. For instance, object-oriented languages provide you variety of pre-defined classes, which can be implemented by the developers to cause a significant reduction in the TTM.
(ii) Integration with Third-Party Solutions: Choose a technology stack that allows you room for third-party integration. This facilitates the developers to incorporate the functionalities offered by other tools thus saving you time and efforts thereby reducing the time to market.
(iii) Developer Availability: Every brilliant idea deserves equally brilliant developers who can transform it into a software masterpiece. You need to find out a bunch of experienced and skilled resources who have a knack for the chosen technology. Their experience will not only add value to your product but also deliver you with quality solutions in appropriate time.
(iv) Easy to Test: A software product is not a single line of code. Therefore, bugs are inevitable. Delivering a hundred percent bug-free code is a myth, but the one that has a minimum of glitches requires a lot of time and efforts. Therefore, choose a technology stack that is testing-friendly. Thanks to technical advancements, we can also opt for a technology stack that operates on the test-driven approach. This method considers testing prior to development thus ensuring high code quality while speeding up the process.
2: Long-term Code Maintainability
Code maintainability depends on various features including the codebase. If the code is lengthy and full of complicated sets of lines, the developers’ valuable time will go consumed by understanding the code and processing it. On the other hand, if the code is too short, the correct debugging is an impossible task. Therefore, choosing a technology stack that uses short feature-specific codes which can be maintained easily and are reusable will prove to be an asset.
3: Future support
It is not only essential to deliver the world with best-in-class solutions. Keeping abreast with latest advancements in technology is equally important to make sure that your product is popular in the market. Will your product be able to stand out its competitors in the future? This question can be easily answered by selecting a technology stack that is not expected to lose it’s edge very soon as it would eventually cause resources to lose their interest in it. Not only this, but you will also fall short of advanced tools to add features to the product.
4: Securities
Digitalization has accompanied many challenges besides its advantages. One such threat is the challenge to security. Cyber attacks, cybercrimes, and similar terms have been gaining popularity for almost two decades. Businesses are continually running under the risk of data breaches. This challenge demands to be addressed with high efficiency and expertise. Hence, while choosing the technology stack for your project ensure that the language you use supports and has a provision for security measures and features.
5: Long-term Scalability
This is one of the features that needs utmost care if you have future goals related to your project. You can look forward to vertical growth focusing on more programs and processors. Additionally, you can also include or choose horizontal growth that caters to running your application on multiple machines simultaneously. No matter what is your goal, it can be achieved by a robust code and a strong foundation of technology. Make sure you choose a technology stack that has immense scope for accommodating growth without unexpected collapse.
6: Overall Cost of Development
Transforming a brilliant idea into a solution does not only require time but also includes financial investments. There are various aspects of development that act as direct determiners of the cost and are themselves defined by the technology stack of the project. Despite the fact that most of the tools and frameworks are the free and open source, subscription to the advanced features needs payment. Not only this, you might need a license to use specific tools and products. Therefore, make an in-depth comparison of the cost of each stack and the usability of its features while listing the tech stack for your project.
7: Hypergrowth Tech Stack
This is the competitive era and who does not want to lead? Not only has this spirit ignited the perfect environment for innovation, but also has to lead to the popularity of the trend known as Hypergrowth. Coined by Harvard Business Review in 2008, Hypergrowth is the term used to describe companies that achieve an annual revenue growth of 40% or higher. For our clients looking forward to jumping on the bandwagon of this change, here is the perfect guide on how to choose the tech stack, compiled by Toptal.
- Hosting: Hypergrowth startups prefer cloud (90%+) over the traditional forms of hosting.
- Back-end tech stack: There is no specific winner in this regard. However, most of the hypergrowth companies choose PHP, Node.js, .NET, Ruby on Rails, Python, and more.
- Database: The research indicated that 50% of the hypergrowth companies use MySQL and PostgreSQL, with slight preference for the latter.
- JavaScript Library: Most of the companies choose JavaScript in their tech stack.
- Mobile Platforms: Mobile is one of the aspects that the companies take on priority, regardless of the fact that they are hypergrowth or growing organizations. Here is how they prioritize the mobile platform.
- Emerging Technologies: Artificial intelligence was among the top choices as emerging technology while blockchain followed the preference list.
