Efficient Software Design Concepts

Designing Reliable and Efficient Systems for Applications

Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay

Introduction

Reliance on computer systems has become a part of everyday life for many people around the world today. We use software to connect with each other, stay up-to-date on current affairs, store important information for later use, and for many other purposes. As developers around the world rush to build applications and deliver new features, the results can vary widely.

Delivering a good experience in the most efficient way possible is the key to building, releasing, or maintaining a successful application or service. At the heart of this are three important conceptual goals:

1. Understanding what the app or service needs to do
2. Selecting the right tools and prioritizing resources to get the job done
3. Tuning the design to achieve and maintain high performance

Within the context of a development lifecycle, these concepts translate roughly into the design, build, and maintain phases. Grasping these concepts at an intuitive level can mean the difference between building a lean, high-performance application that exceeds expectations, or one that suffers from performance and usability issues.

Part I — Keeping it Clean and Simple

The first objective is to understand what your product will do and why. Without this information, it won’t matter what tools you might use, how many resources you have available, or how great the market is.

Here are a few concepts to keep in mind during this phase:

• What will your product do exactly?
• Why is your product different from other products on the market?
• What features could or should you leave out to keep it simple?
• How might someone try to abuse / misuse / break your product?
• What value will your product bring to those who use it?

A good simple design will go a long way towards producing a high-quality product that is easy to maintain and meets the expectations of those who will use it. In general, the more time you can put into this phase, the less time you will have to correct mistakes in the future. Do your research and remember that a little preparation can go a long way.

Part II — Choosing the Right Tools and Getting the Job Done

With any project, the tools and resources are directly tied to the people who use them, and should therefore be chosen wisely. This is especially important when it comes to sifting through buzzwords and hype to make an objective decision that actually works as intended.

Not every tool or piece of technology is right for every project, and in some cases using the wrong kind of method or solution can make it much more difficult to achieve a successful outcome. Bolting on complexity for no reason has diminishing returns from the start, so keep it simple.

Look at similar products and services that you might be able to learn from, and see how they are put together and why they are built the way they are.

There are many different methodologies and strategies for building things, and at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter which one you choose so long as it works for your situation. In general, however, it can be very helpful to begin prototyping your product right away once you have a solid idea of what you want to build. This allows you to begin testing your ideas sooner rather than later, which can help tremendously when it comes to building good software that people can easily interact with and use.

Remember that prioritizing and optimizing the resources you already have is often a better idea than simply throwing more resources at a project and hoping for better results. The more people on a project, the greater the complexity in communication between these people, and so it can become an endless uphill battle when trying to gain progress using brute force and throwing more people at it. Keep things as clean as possible and only hire on what you really need.

Part III — Fine-tuning and Maintenance

Last but not least, we arrive at the maintenance phase, in which ongoing work is performed to improve and maintain the overall quality of the product. This should begin with a review to search for any inefficiencies or areas where great improvements could be made with relatively low effort.

If there is something that can be done right now to improve the quality of your product, it will cost less time and/or money to handle this sooner rather than later. It’s not going to be any easier to make changes down the road, with more people using your product and more demands on your schedule. There is a trade-off here as with most situations, however if there is anything that stands out as being simple to improve while having high impact, then it’s usually a good idea to go ahead and make these improvements now.

Often, several improvements can be rolled into one upgrade, and some things can be fixed at no real additional cost, by “piggybacking” them onto other jobs. This is where solid refactoring strategies are useful and can go a long way towards improving the stability and ease of maintenance of a product. Learning how to prioritize, group, and execute on code refactoring and performance improvement tasks can mean the difference between technical debt versus a product that eventually requires almost no maintenance at all.

Conclusion

While entire books have been written on this subject and it’s difficult to condense this topic into a single article, I hope that I’ve been able to provide some insight into the basic concepts that are important to remember and yet are often very easy to forget.

Remember to keep things simple, choose the right tool for the job, and put in just a little extra effort towards the end to really make your product shine.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your next project!

Kenneth Reilly (8_bit_hacker) is CTO of LevelUP