How to Drastically Reduce Blockchain Development Schedules 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 ones have discovered—the hard way—how adding blockchain to applications may blow up schedules and ruin time-to-market plans. Building blockchain application 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 vast amount of understanding, knowledge and experience. There is an acute shortage of experienced blockchain developers, which is not unlike the situation when Java started to experience high demand and use. Experience not only includes know-how, but also the ability to make better development decisions and avoid mistakes. It also involves understanding of features and implementations to make better use of blockchain technology. Gaining this kind of experience and understanding takes time, and, for the most part, widespread familiarity of developing and integrating blockchain is still in the early stage.

The path for blockchain development and integration may be laden with mistakes and wrong turns that can be extremely costly. Common pitfalls are selecting the wrong blockchain technology for the application or difficulty with backend services and infrastructure. Portability and scalability are also considerable issues. Having to switch blockchain technologies midstream in a project costs dearly and nearly sends it back to square one. 

To minimize these effects, there are three practices that management can help put in place to ensure development schedules are met and costs contained. The first begins with recognizing the difficulties of blockchain development already enumerated here. With such perspective, management needs to treat blockchain development as a priority and assign the proper resources to it. In some cases, this may mean hiring an expert consultant or consulting firm to fast-track the efforts and, hopefully, avoid mistakes while engaging 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 misfit and lack of clear instruction or goals can easily derail productive work in blockchain development. Also, bringing on someone with an inadequate set of experience for the particular job may be another issue. Use of a consultant may be the right thing, but it also may be the wrong thing to do.

One alternative to an outside 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 augment 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 it is with Java, it is feasible that developers with little or no blockchain experience may be able to use a blockchain development platform quite productively.

A second practice for management is to ensure that the business goals and objectives are clearly outlined prior to blockchain development work. How will blockchain be used? How will its decentralized structure mesh with overall IT operations?  What are customer or user expectations? How will one utilize transparency in the governance process? Is there sensitivity to speed and latency? Are there regulatory requirements to consider?  All of these things should be taken into account before development begins.

Third is having a clear understanding of the technical parameters. As with understanding business parameters, this is a “look before you leap” step that prevents or mitigates missteps, lengthy delays and other problems downstream. For instance, 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 definite 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. Blockchain does not include business logic or a user interface, for instance, so teams need to know how to expose and integrate blockchain technology with other components.

Blockchain offers tremendous capabilities that may bring important competitive differentiation, higher customer satisfaction, lower operational cost structures and other strategic benefits. At the same time, many blockchain projects have never made it to the light of day. It is not just projects and applications. Startups have seen their demise because of blockchain mistakes. With blockchain development, both opportunity as well as peril exist. Being attentive to these three management principles will maximize the former and help prevent the latter.