Stop software development costs from eating your world.

In 2011, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, captured the tech world’s attention with the article “Why software is eating the world”. Fourteen years later, the top capitalized companies in the world are either software companies, or ones that power software.  Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google) round out the “Top Five” companies in the world, as ranked by market capitalization. 

Software truly has eaten much of the world, as Marc predicted so many years ago.

Market Size

The software market continues to grow at a much faster rate that the overall economy – 11.3% CAGR – according to Precedence Research. Worldwide software sales are expected to almost triple from US$824 billion in 2025 to US$2,247 billion in 2034.  

While software is influential today, it’ll be even more important in the years ahead.

Bigger, more complicated, and remote teams

With increasing demand, software development has become a much bigger, more complicated and global business, with a significant portion of offshore development.  

Inflation

As the demand for software outstrips the supply of talent, inflation has pressured software development firms to specialize and to outsource development.   There are now entire departments dedicated to each of the functions in this chart. 

The various teams involved in software development also come from different disciplines ranging from business, project management, design, development, and testing.  These players have different ways of thinking – many are analytical, others creative, and some a combination of both.   

It is not uncommon for there to be power struggles within this supply chain, and the most common one is the tension between designers and developers – especially in the area of UI design, which this article will focus on. 

The designers have a vision and often believe the developers aren’t skilled enough to realize this vision. Whereas the developers believe the designers are detached from the realities of coding and what is possible. Disputes are common with productivity suffering as companies scale their software teams. 

Remote work

Add the Work-from-home dynamic, where developers do not want to return to a central office – starting with the Covid 19 pandemic - and large software development teams are now separated in different buildings, cities, and even countries. 

As this chart demonstrates the vast majority of software development is done by remote or hybrid work. This can reduce the cost of development but it increases other costs including that of project management, communications, and quality assurance.

Mistakes from communications, the pressure to perform, different ways of thinking, and growing customer demands, often negatively affect the quality of the software. 

Problems specific to software development

Software development requires companies to trade-off the same quality, price, speed trade-offs as other businesses. There are also specific problems that modern software companies face, that give rise to increasing costs, decreasing quality, and the more time required to produce quality code. These include problems include the need for:

1. Excellent communications – software is often done with multinational teams working in different languages. So even with the best communications one could have an English-speaking business owner, briefing a Russian speaking UX/UI designer, for work to be done from a Hindi speaking developer. Further none of these parties either meet and much can get “lost in translation”.

2. Integration with key digital tools – it’s important that the software development process be well integrated with all the IT systems used by the company. These include many of the tools listed in the chart below.

   

3. Culture – there are many types of disciplines and thinking within the software development supply chain, starting with business folks at the start of the process, process engineers in the project management part of the supply chain, UX/UI creators, to experienced software engineers in the coding process to testers in Quality Assurance. Simple tools are needed to surface differences quickly and in a way that is understood and accepted by all these generally siloed teams.

4. Quality assurance - it is important to identify gaps between design and development early for the further down the track one goes the more expensive it is to fix a problem.

Tackling one key problem at a time – start with UI – the “face” of software development.

Optimizing the entire process of software development can be likened to the phrase “Boiling the ocean”. It’s theoretically possible, but not practical for any one organization to face. A much better approach is to focus on a specific vertical and to address the issues facing it.

Zanemi is a new company designed to fix many of the problems facing the UI side of software development. We call it Zanemi because it’s the “Enemy of waste”. It’s designed to make software development more effective and efficient, specifically tackling the gaps among software designers, developers and quality assurance teams. 

It specifically addresses the following problems. (Gents, I need some screen shots for these ideas.) 

1. Communicates in all languages.

Zanemi ensures that communications are done in both a common language (e.g., English) and simultaneously translated into the preferred language of specific members of the team. For example, this could be Russian for a designer and Ukrainian for a developer.  We do this via Google translate (?) 

2. Identifies gaps between design and development early in the process. 

Zanemi has a unique visual display that clearly identifies the gaps between design and development in a way that all parties can readily see and act upon the differences.

3. Presents logical steps for resolution.

Zanemi uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) module to analyze the gaps between design and develop as well as presenting a logical path to close these gaps. It also translates these instructions into the languages that the users prefer, simplifying communications and getting faster results.

4. Reduces the load on Quality Assurance

Zanemi surfaces problems visually so these can easily be seen, understood and addressed by all parties involved. This greatly reduces the load and costs related to the Quality Assurance team.

The Benefits to your UX design

With Zanemi you will save at least 10% of your entire software development costs by surfacing problems quickly, presenting them in a visual format that simplifies understanding, greatly reduces communications and translation costs, and makes the lives of quality assurance people much easier. 

While software continues to grow the costs of its development – from a human resources, technology, and customer demand perspective, will only grow.  

If you don’t want software to eat your entire organization, you need ways to control its cost. 

Zanemi is designed to do just this – keep the costs of UI software development under control.