Software Development Guides & Resources

Software development guides and resources for planning your project

Budgeting and planning a software project is hard when every vendor quotes differently. These guides explain what drives cost and time, what questions to ask, and how to compare options — so you can make decisions with confidence, whoever you choose to work with.

Where to start

How we write these guides

These guides are written by the people who plan and deliver our projects. They aim to help you make decisions, not to sell a particular answer: where an off-the-shelf product or a different approach is better, they say so. Costs and timelines are given as typical ranges rather than precise quotes, because real figures depend on scope, integrations and team — and we explain what moves them up or down.

We update guides when practices or platforms change. If there is a question you would like answered, send it to us and we may cover it in a future guide.

Topics covered

• Budgeting — what drives cost, typical ranges and how to estimate reliably
• Decisions — build vs buy, CRM vs ERP, choosing a stack, choosing a hiring model
• Planning — MVP scope, the development life cycle and writing an RFP
• After launch — maintenance, updates and keeping software healthy

Using these guides with your team

Several guides include checklists and templates you can copy into your own planning documents — the MVP checklist, the RFP template and the maintenance plan in particular. They work well as a shared starting point for conversations between business stakeholders and technical teams, so everyone uses the same vocabulary when discussing scope, budget and risk.

How to brief a software partner

Most of the guides on this page lead to the same practical step: explaining your project to a development partner clearly enough to get useful advice and a realistic estimate. A good brief does not need to be long. It should cover:

• The problem you are solving and who experiences it
• What success looks like in measurable terms
• Must-have features for a first release versus later ideas
• Systems the software must connect to and data that needs migrating
• Constraints: budget range, deadlines, compliance and preferred technologies
• Who will make decisions and how quickly

Our RFP template expands each of these points, and the estimation guide explains how partners turn a brief into numbers.

Which guide should you read first?

Each guide is written by our engineers and reviewed when tools, prices or practices change. We avoid made-up statistics; where we give figures, they are typical ranges to help you plan, not promises.

Planning tools in these guides

Several guides include practical tools you can reuse with your team: scoring tables for comparing vendors, checklists for launch readiness, worked examples of cost and timeline estimates, and decision frameworks for choosing between building and buying. Copy them into your own planning documents and adapt the criteria to your organisation. If you would like a second opinion on a plan you have built using them, our engineers are happy to review it.

We add and update guides as tools, prices and good practice change. If there is a question you would like us to answer, tell us through the contact page; useful questions often become new guides.

Turning a guide into a plan

Reading is the easy part; applying a guide to your own situation is where most of the value lies. A simple approach that works for many teams is to pick the single guide closest to your current decision, copy its checklist or scoring table into a shared document, and fill it in together with the people who will use, fund and maintain the software. Gaps in that document — unknown integrations, unclear owners, no agreed budget range — are exactly the questions to resolve before talking to vendors.

If you would like a second pair of eyes, send us the completed document. We will point out risks and assumptions worth testing, even if you decide to build with another partner or in-house.

New guides are listed here as soon as they are published.

More guides

• How to choose a tech stack
• Custom vs off-the-shelf software
• CRM vs ERP
• How to hire software developers
• Outsourcing vs staff augmentation
• SaaS MVP checklist
• The software development life cycle
• Software development RFP template
• Software maintenance guide
• Software project estimation

Have a question we have not covered? Ask us and we will answer it directly.