How to Drastically Reduce Blockchain Development Plans for Faster Time to Market and Lower Costs
Despite its popularity and great utility, blockchain has been a difficult experience for many organizations, and countless have discovered—the hard way—how adding blockchain to applications can blow up schedules and destroy time-to-market plans. Building blockchain applications from scratch is one of the more difficult software development challenges, requiring extensive knowledge and experience.
Blockchain coding and development is difficult and complex, requiring a huge amount of understanding, knowledge and experience. There is an acute shortage of experienced blockchain developers, which is not unlike the situation when Java began to experience high demand and use. Experience includes not only knowledge, but also the ability to make better development decisions and avoid mistakes. It also involves understanding functions and implementations to make better use of blockchain technology. Gaining this kind of experience and understanding takes time, and for the most part, widespread awareness of blockchain development and integration is still at an early stage.
The path of blockchain development and integration can be fraught with mistakes and wrong turns that can be extremely costly. Common pitfalls are choosing the wrong blockchain technology for the application or problems with backend services and infrastructure. Portability and scalability are also significant issues. Having to switch blockchain technology midstream in a project is expensive and almost sends it back to square one.
To minimize these effects, there are three practices that management can help implement to ensure that development plans are met and costs are contained. The first begins by acknowledging the difficulties of blockchain development already enumerated here. With such a perspective, management must treat blockchain development as a priority and allocate the right resources to it. In some cases, this may mean hiring an expert consultant or consulting firm to speed up efforts and hopefully avoid mistakes while working with best practices.
As with other software development tasks, hiring a consultant or consultancy is not an instant panacea. Communication difficulties, an “us and them” mentality or cultural mismatch, and a lack of clear instructions or goals can easily derail productive work in blockchain development. Bringing in someone with insufficient experience for the job at hand can also be another problem. Using a consultant can be the right thing to do, but it can also be the wrong thing to do.
An alternative to an external consultant or consultancy is the use of abstraction tools or platforms that are now available. As it was, and still is, with Java development, a good abstraction platform can increase the efforts of internal developers, making the task of creating or integrating blockchain far easier and requiring less experience. Such an approach should solve or minimize portability and scalability issues and make better or more options available to less experienced developers. In fact, as with Java, it is possible that developers with little or no blockchain experience may be able to use a blockchain development platform quite productively.
Another management practice is to ensure that the business goals and objectives are clearly outlined prior to blockchain development work. How will blockchain be used? How will the decentralized structure fit in with the general IT operation? What are the customer’s or users’ expectations? How will transparency be utilized in the management process? Is it sensitive to speed and latency? Are there regulatory requirements to consider? All these things should be taken into consideration before development starts.
Third is to have a clear understanding of the technical parameters. As with understanding business parameters, this is a “look before you leap” step that prevents or reduces missteps, long delays, and other problems downstream. For example, the revolutionary smart contract features of blockchain shift execution from centralized IT infrastructure to execution by all nodes in a peer-to-peer network. Such a shift has clear implications and challenges for scalability. How can this be overcome?
Another technical question might be how blockchain integrates with other aspects of an application or system. For example, blockchain does not include business logic or a user interface, so teams must know how to expose and integrate blockchain technology with other components.
Blockchain offers enormous opportunities that can provide important competitive differentiation, higher customer satisfaction, lower operating cost structures and other strategic benefits. At the same time, many blockchain projects have never come to light. It’s not just projects and applications. Startups have seen their demise due to blockchain failures. With blockchain development, both opportunity and danger exist. Being mindful of these three management principles will maximize the former and help prevent the latter.
