“It’s the main tech stack that decides the peripheral systems or technologies that are needed to support the application. Finally, it defines the DNA of the tech company- whether you want to be at the edge of innovation leveraging tech stacks in their prime or prefer tech stack that have been around for some time and are low-risk options,” said Mayank Rausaria, Partner, Deloitte India.
Technology is a means to achieve a business goal. Without losing sight of this, it is vital to choose a technology that aligns with the current business goal and future proofs the business goal that could evolve into more goals and objectives.
“The technology stack you select may mean your product hits the market a few months before your competition and that is enough to capture the lion’s share of the market. It could also mean you would be able to launch features at double the frequency or a third of the cost of your competitors. In other scenarios, a bad choice may mean that your product lacks the finesse that is mandatory to make the product succeed,” said Piyush Jha, Vice President – Engineering, GlobalLogic.
Strategy to pick a tech stack
The strategic approach to pick a tech stack is to first have a thorough understanding of the business problem and then pick the most apt technologies that will help solve the problem. It is easier to be flexible with technology when the business challenge at hand is well known. One of the critical considerations while choosing the technology stack has to be the availability of a skill set within the organization to drive synergies and manage cost.
“The important factors to keep in mind while choosing the tech stack are the needs of the customer, time to market and the size of the wallet. These are the three most important axes that determine the stack one should choose, and they do not always align very well together. In fact, at times we have seen enterprises going web-mobile only to go native later. But then one can do flutter which will serve both the needs,” added Jha.
Choosing the right stack
Identify the nature of business problems: Mayank Rausaria, Partner, Deloitte India, insists on identifying and understanding the nature of business problems we are trying to solve here.
“Are we building a web/mobile app where content gets updated multiple times in an hour by editing existing pages or adding new pages such as a news web/mobile app? If yes, then one would give more importance to the content management system (CMS) or design of the CMS. If we are building a B2B eCommerce web application where content is not changed frequently but complex business processes and order fulfilment processes exist, then CMS might take a lower priority,” he explained.
Skill Sets : Skillsets of existing employees need to be gauged correctly. Picking the tech stack closest to the skills that the teams already have will assure a shorter learning curve, fewer team uncertainties and issues. It would be easier to upskill the existing team members rather than onboarding new teams.
Time and budget: The next important aspect to look at is the effort, time and cost for the chosen tech stack to achieve the immediate goal and the long-term ownership and evolution of the application.
“Different companies follow different strategies. Few go with COTS products, which might have faster go to market timelines but might play same as any other tech stack in the long run, few go with open source which might have an impact with go to market timelines (could be mitigated if planned carefully) but might play well in the long run,” added Rausaria.
For web and mobile applications, the no-code tech stack is emerging as a leading choice for businesses. No-code is a method that allows users with no coding skills to build software applications using visual drag-and-drop interface without writing any code.
“No-code allows applications to be developed with current goals at speed and scale and future proofs the applications and reduces the cost of long-term ownership. It also brings in agility and flexibility, allowing businesses to make changes to the applications as they keep getting feedback in a matter of minutes and hours,” said Gautam Nimmagadda, Founder & CEO, Quixy.
By abstracting software development complexities, No-code allows domain and business experts to participate and build the software first-hand, resulting in higher quality solutions as they know the problem and solution better than any software expert.
There are various technology options available and we need to evaluate holistically considering the parameters defined above to finalize the best technical stack. It is very important not to bloat the tech stack and make it a laundry list of different technologies. The choice must be made wisely based on different use cases and try to standardize the stack to keep the cost of maintenance, future proof investments and not compromise on business agility.
