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A founder had an idea and engaged a software development company in Pune to turn it into a functional digital product. They discussed their expectations, delivery timeline, and the demo.
Everything was discussed briefly, but when the release date approached, the app started crashing or bugs began appearing frequently. It became a nightmare.
The workflow is structured with an aggressive sprint plan, but the app is taking longer to ship.
When asked why, the development company said the requirements keep changing. The founder said the tech team members are taking time; the team was excused due to integration incompatibility or resource unavailability.
Then the real picture: the delay getting delayed, it is not the main reason the shipment is delayed. It reflects the reality of a failed project.
When the software project ended, it seemed as if all the time, effort, and budget had been wasted. With this, the company’s position and the development team’s reputation are at stake, reinforcing customer trust.
If you see the project is failing, don’t lose patience; it can still be rescued if it's planned strategically and communication remains transparent. Before the project's flag warning sign appeared, we avoided them in a rush; now it's more difficult.
In this blog, we are outlining the red flags and strategic tips to avoid disaster in custom software development projects and regain control.
Take a Glance At a Real World Project Failure Incident
In our team we have assigned a task to design the UI/ UX for a specific webpage. The designer was efficient and loved to do experiments but he was swamped with multiple projects so just referred to the doc in the beginning and started focusing on the multiple tasks.
Due to exhaustion and multiple project responsibilities the UI/ UX didn’t align with expectations. The project needs to deliver within a month but frequent fixes causing it delay making everyone frustrated. That happened because he didn’t refer to the document to clearly understand what needed to be done.
The problem happened again but as the project manager noticed this before the deadline date clearly communicated explaining him in detail and saved the time and efforts.
Why Do Software Development Projects Fail?
Most founders believe they have invested significantly to ensure the project succeeds and have hired the best custom software development team, yet the project is taking longer to complete. They have multiple questions about why that happened.
Nobody wants their idea to take a back seat or pause before reaching the final stage. An urgent meet fixed to evaluate the reasons, and a few things discovered:
Frequent Changes
In this chaotic, competitive marketplace, it’s normal to experience confusion and to make an informed decision that's feasible and flexible given the circumstances.
So, taking an initiative in a rush just to seize the moment, or out of fear that competitors may launch first, may lead a development team to take a quick-to-deploy path that seems simple at first but can suddenly create a mountain of obstacles.
Whenever in doubt, confused, or lacking the energy to make a decision, take a break. A little delay at the start may save you from making costly mistakes.
Lacks Accountability to Accomplish
Deploying the full-fledged product is not a one-person effort; it requires a collaborative team. Still, one needs to act as a strategist and leader to make quick decisions in crisis situations, taking accountability for every win and failure.
Not everyone holds a leadership quality, but if one can’t stand by their word, this will impact the project's progress, leading to off-track. To avoid major problems, an individual should take ownership of the project and ensure everything is aligned.
Whether we have SRS and PRD ready, we still feel the need to connect on a call so that if any team has doubts, they can ask a cross functional team. Without proper communication, teams can lose their path, leading to delayed release, technical, and financial debt.
Unclear of Resource
A lean budget and resource constraints don’t align with client expectations, which will make the project due. Sometimes the tech stack doesn't suit the modern mechanisms that are tuned as blockers to well-structured project workflows.
Misinterpretation of Resources
Custom software app development companies managed projects across different niches, following a well-structured sprint plan. They are very confident and optimistic in their approach, expecting that all phases will be completed within the scheduled timeline. They ignore that issues can arise at any moment, you can’t predict the future. It’s better to keep a buffer time to avoid delays.
Red Flags to Watch Before a Project Goes Off Track
Code can crash, or UI/ UX may encounter technical glitches its common, but that doesn’t mean the project failed. Before hitting the crisis, a software flags the signals to take action and mend it on time.
Conversation based on Assumption
Customers don’t want fake promises or false estimates; they want the exact release date. If the tools are not available or the dates keep changing, the team also loses interest. They often reply that we can figure it out, or we will try to get it done. When the team doesn’t feel confident and the conversation just keeps going on in disguise, it means everything is not synced as planned.
Sparing time to fix the glitches instead of focusing on experimenting with something new. If team members are facing too much technical rework in the initial phase, it’s a red flag to review the project plan immediately; otherwise, the team will get stuck in the middle, juggling crises on a frequent basis. It usually happens when the goals are defined well or the roadmap is prepared in a rush.
Pressure to Achieve More and with Aggressive Speed
Hasty decisions lead to major mistakes; also, when someone is under pressure to achieve a goal faster, performance levels drop. Sometimes the development team starts working on the project, just taking the briefs or checking the documentation in the initial phase.
They are just going with the flaw without referring to the doc, it may create misunderstanding or misalignment of requirements if something needs to be modified midway. It will recur bugs and technical glitches in future due to imbalance. Even if they complete the project on time, quality will still be affected.
Collaboration Stopped with Stakeholders
All stakeholders have different opinions on the project; they may share their inputs to evaluate its progress. If the stakeholder says they raise no issues, lack interest in regular scrum, or shut themselves completely out. The project may lose direction.
It's an alarming point for the development team to ask stakeholders to engage. If no doubts arise in meetings or discussions, the development team should recognize that the relationship is fading.
Team Has No Bandwidth
All the team members are swamped with projects and multiple project responsibilities, but there’s no clue how many milestones have been achieved without any fatigue or frequent fixes. It showcases the team is productive enough but most of their time is wasted into scrum calls, ground level research, or fixing bugs, but the milestones that need to be achieved in the given timeline are not leading in sequence.
What Happens When a Project Gets Delayed?
Custom software developed addressing the specific business domain operations and products in mind, they’re not leveraged with generic features that fit all.
By the time, due to frequent changes in requirements or client needs, or if the team member is reserved on another project, the project stopped in the middle and failed to deliver optimal results. Other real-world problems due to project delay:
Disturb the Partnership
No matter what, leading the project delay to issues, but a late release date shatters customer trust. Everyone is under pressure and tension because they are accountable for completing the project on time.
If anything delays the project, the client will not listen to the explanation; they have nothing to do with what is causing the delay or any hurdles. The team tries their best to complete their job, but in such a stressful environment, anyone can lose their temper and feel no motivation.
Negative Impact on Brand Reputation
If a team always delivers the project on time but misses the delivery date this time, it will definitely reduce their points, impacting their ranking and reputation. It raises questions about the team's capabilities.
The department will think twice before assigning any responsibility in the future. No matter how efficient the team is, a missed deadline puts the reputation on the line.
Uncertainty to Lead Future Project
If the same team members have multiple responsibilities and if one project gets delayed, this also impacts a little bit on the other projects once scheduled after that project. The project manager can’t assign the new responsibilities or free or scale the resources and tools for further projects until the previous project is finished. It impacts the growth and progress of the business.
Justification can’t Mend relationships
Every penny matters, but even a minute's delay in the project makes the development team anxious. If the project code is being restructured or fixed every single day or if the loop of testing and technical glitches is kept rolling on, then it makes the developers feel anxious. Because every project, for every phase, has a predefined budget, if most of it is spent in the initial UI/UX fixes phase, it will create a financial burden.
3 Days Plan for Project Stabilisation
The moment we see warming our mind starts thinking straight to a solution. Multiple thoughts in mind, is there any way to refactor, or do we need to do it from scratch? Show that we reset the priority and features. Stop panicking and take a pause, and first try to regain control by stabilizing the situation.
Fix the Flaws that Manageable
Set up the plan to control what is in your hands. You don’t need to completely stop the development process; you just need to manage it gradually. Prioritize small changes immediately and defer hard functionality changes for later. If you just wait for the situation to improve, don’t forget that a new problem can also arise in the meantime.
Branching for Latest Changes
At the backend, you can see when the last time changes were made and when the deployment was done. You will be able to see production failure incidents and bugs. A few features may be half-baked, and some other one to refactor code. You need to create a branch naming stabilisation, getting back the confidence.
Keep the Observability On
Without monitoring the KPIs, you can’t predict the progress. By evaluating failure rates, load, latency, and data flow speed, you can understand what's blocking progress. Through the KPI setup, it would get easier to avoid the noise and tune the signals, aligning the goals.
Hire the authoritative person to make a decision, evaluating the situation to hold, go forward, or roll back. It enforces accountability to take an immediate call if a risk is encountered.
To keep the process transparent and clear, creating a risk log is advantageous. Where you can check risk factors, dependencies, issues, and assumptions.
10-day Plan to Gather the Facts
Here in this phase you are collecting the root cause evidence that is staging the drama of project failure.
Process Workflow & Delivery
Start with basic DORA metrics, including deployment frequency,
failure rate inflation, and
mean time to restore.
Review branching strategy
Prioritizing trunk based deployment
Investigate Architecture and Code (Intense Audit)
Without evaluating all the phases, it’s harder to understand the root causes until we know how to resolve them and regain control. Auditing the project will give a health report identifying the hidden risks and gaps to optimize the workflow.
Along with the tech stack audit, it's time to reevaluate the budget estimate, deadline, and potential dynamics to maintain transparency.
Snap Inconsistent UI/ UX
Beyond the technical need to gather user funnel data when they sign in, sign out drop off to estimate the conversion. Poor UI/ UX force the user to drop the app faster.
Security Audit
Assessment survey to discover the hidden vulnerabilities and check if the app complies with all the security compliance standards or not like OWASP, DPIA or GDPR.
These diagnosis phases establish the broken trust and help to restructure the product development track.
Recovery with Valued driven Replanning
Once you diagnose the issues and also gather the facts the temptation will reduce. Its time to structure the plan to add value to the project.
Reduce Time to Insights
Instead of focusing on the count of features, aim for accomplishment: such as boosting conversion, reducing bounce rate and extending time of users. Your outcomes will show if the project is on track or not.
Apply Weighted Shortest Job First
To keep the process evidence based you need to calculate the incentive for most value in the shortest time.
Incentive=Cost of delay/ job size
Keep the Essential Feature Request
Remove the features that don’t drive the major outcome. Reduce its scope for the time until it is urgent. It will help to narrow the workflow, saving time.
Structural Win for Every Horizon
Don't be trapped with a quarter or 6 month sprint plan. Divide the task in small chunks of weekly goals and milestones. Don’t be exhausted with more work.
Let the momentum establish once you start seeing outcomes and you have bandwidth to do more you can add more tasks to win.
These small milestone accomplishments will give you confidence and develop trust in all the stakeholders evidencing the visual task.
What to Prioritize: Refactor or Rebuild
You are done with replanning now two things creates a dilemma as they seem similar in first instances: Refactor or Rebuild
Whatever you choose will cost effort and time so you need to think wisely and take a call. To make your decision easier here are the points:
Refactor is a smart move to rescue the project approaching failure. You fix the problematic parts one by default eliminating functional errors in limited time making the delivery faster.
One the flip side, refactoring works best for all the critical scenarios where security, financial, outdated tech stack and architecture exist. To get sustainable long term success and outcomes we recommend you to consult the custom software development company in Pune.
Confirm the Delivery System
We at Eternalight focus on developing the reliable pipeline because sometimes even the best structured, readable code seems vulnerable to users. Aim for swift project delivery with visible wins.
Trunk based Development
If the feature branches are lengthy coded it will arise conflicts with frequent modifications. Developers prefer trunk-based development leveraged with robust rapid automation testing enabling swift shipping with low risk.
Instead of doing the full switch developers should cut down branch scope to accept more mergers in future.
Stage Feature Flag
Isolate the feature flags from release keeping the production in a dark state. Which to release when it feels secure because not all fresh feature deployment you release will act normal; they may disturb other features disrupting the app performance. Instead of the entire release implement changes when risk is low.
Redefine Update story
Every change you make should go with multiple test cases, unit, integration, stress to check the stability every time you release a change/ update to ensure quality.
Daily Disciplined Review
Whether you require or not a dedicated 15 to 30 minute standup will be worth it to avoid project drowning. Monitor the RAID log and discuss the strategies and issues to get clarity for timely delivery.
Applying this strategy makes the project safe, sustainable and secure, eliminating risks.
Security & Compliance
Security isn’t an optional thing; it is the critical factor for the rescue phase. Generally the vulnerabilities encountered if the tool, libraries or functionality are not aligned with real use cases and outdated systems.
Keep it on by default into delivery with limited privilege access, to address broken authentication, insecure components, inconsistent injection flaws are the common critical security patches that can put the project in danger.
To validate your app, prioritise application security verification standards with OWASP to trace the potential risk.
Prepare the project for failure scenarios complying the backup and restore processes aligning the recovery time objective recovery point objective.
Test the real world flaws integrating CI/ CD pipeline along with static and dynamic application testing.
Confirm all the security standards requirements to prevent awful scenarios.
Done with technical recovery it's time to look over the financial debt too that also leads to the project delay.
Financial Transparency with Realistic Forecast
Don’t think fixing the technical part is your win and now the project is in control, while tackling the technical part, finances need to be managed. If it is neglected this time you will feel disappointed due to sudden changes and hidden maintenance.
Being optimistic isn’t the wrong thing but we can’t plan the success on just probabilities. According to Little's law, stop focusing on what's in progress but instead focus on throughput achievement and make the prediction for final delivery on time.
While planning the budget give them a label to identify where your money is going so you can future workload and make decisions.
Having financial clarity establishes credibility and confidence. As we know financial leads and other stakeholder only matter the outcomes instead of velocity charts.
Choose the Right Approach for Recovery
While you are planning to recover the project you must know if it needs basic minor fixes or big changes. Do you need a major upgrade, high live mapping with stabilisation, diagnosis? Decide the approach as per your business needs and outcome choose light, easy, medium or high.
Light Plan (for Patch Work and Drive Stability)
Suitable for where short term goals have not been accomplished building blocks are good and only a few module modifications can drive outcome. It can be done in 15 to 25 days.
Medium Plan (Technical Debt including UI/ UX, delivery)
Tackle the root issues without the full recovery mode adapting 3 days audit and 10 days stabilisation plan, compliance configuration, eliminating toxic modules, backlogs and prioritising the trunk-based development, strangler fig pattern or feature flags, full project sprint plan for 60 days
Full Plan (Intense Transition Needed)
From architecture and UI/ UX to critical security vulnerabilities, if everything needs to be addressed including the financial cost, custom software development teams need to think from scratch. It will take around 90 days to 6 months to save the project failure.
In this approach it is essential to go for the stabilisation and audit phase but along with this there’s need of assessment to apply the trunk based workflows, TIME model, progressive delivery method with automated fallback recovery strategies.
Blend of agile and DevOps methodologies, FinOps governance
It will actually extend the budget for resetting everything for long term success.
Whatever you select it must align the intent and business goals resolving all the technical and financial glitches strategically.
Tips To Rescue an App Development Project from Failure
Consultation from Tech experts
A professional custom software development company focuses on code readability. They connect with all developers and stakeholders to define project goals for each phase, finalize the right tech stack compatible with the project idea and legacy systems, and help make necessary decisions.
Intense Testing and Performance Monitoring
To ensure code reliability and quality, we use automation tools such as Postman and Cypress, which reduce the time and effort required by the quality analyst. We aim to resolve potential technical glitches in advance and ensure compliance with security requirements before serving the app to users.
Robust and Reliable Essential Tooling
Modifying the process won’t alone will save the project failure. To get the confidence we need the modern reliable techstack that can align well with the business goals. No need to fall for expensive subscriptions, go for minimum viable tooling kit and resources essential to stabilise project and visible wins.
Essential Tools
GitHub, GitLab, Jira, ConfigCat, ESLint, New relic, datadog, Slack, LogDNA, OWASP, DAST/ SAST, GDPR, FinOps Tools, Autoscaling rules cloud tagging policies and other tools enable the CI/ CD testing,branching, source control, intense project monitoring and management. All these tools contribute to project success.
Execution through Domain Experts
No matter how efficient the team players are but not everyone is jack of all trades so if you have the option to outsource product development company experts from a different timezone that’s worth it.
Before hiring someone must review their work in the relevant domain and the year of experience to build your trust. Clutch, TopDevelopers, GoodFirms are some of the top ratings and review sites that list the best outsource companies recognizing their work in industry.Consultation from Tech experts
A professional custom software development company focuses on code readability. They connect with all developers and stakeholders to define project goals for each phase, finalize the right tech stack compatible with the project idea and legacy systems, and help make necessary decisions.
Intense Testing and Performance Monitoring
To ensure code reliability and quality, we use automation tools such as Postman and Cypress, which reduce the time and effort required by the quality analyst. We aim to resolve potential technical glitches in advance and ensure compliance with security requirements before serving the app to users.
Robust and Reliable Essential Tooling
Modifying the process won’t alone will save the project failure. To get the confidence we need the modern reliable techstack that can align well with the business goals. No need to fall for expensive subscriptions, go for minimum viable tooling kit and resources essential to stabilise project and visible wins.
Essential Tools
GitHub, GitLab, Jira, ConfigCat, ESLint, New relic, datadog, Slack, LogDNA, OWASP, DAST/ SAST, GDPR, FinOps Tools, Autoscaling rules cloud tagging policies and other tools enable the CI/ CD testing, branching, source control, intense project monitoring and management. All these tools contribute to project success.
Execution through Domain Experts
No matter how efficient the team players are but not everyone is jack of all trades so if you have the option to outsource product development company experts from a different timezone that’s worth it.
Before hiring someone must review their work in the relevant domain and the year of experience to build your trust. Clutch, TopDevelopers, GoodFirms are some of the top ratings and review sites that list the best outsource companies recognizing their work in industry.
How at Eternalight Infotech We Rescue the Project Failure?
A project failure incident isn't a failure of a project; it's a waste of time and effort along with financial burden. No founder thinks of this worst case scenario.
One wrong move or slight change in requirements or missed details can lead to the project failure. Not all the experiments are worth it, some may fail too.
At Eternalight we maintain a full transparent, professional structured and straightforward approach. We evaluate all the critical factors, aligning the user persona, to avoid financial and tech debt.
From idea to development team cost, resource planning and allocation, tech stack as per requirements, keeping the buffer amount of time and money with senior level experts/ CTOs. ensuring all milestones get achieved on time sustaining growth.
Conclusion
A project stuck midway or just before the release is a common and critical scenario. We say cracks remain even if we fix them. That’s true but while developing any software product with a strategic approach it can repair well. Broken or off track projects may shake the confidence yet with modern technical insights and consultation unfinished projects can recover.
Ayushi Shrivastava
(Author)
Senior Content Writer
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