Generative AI for application development in SMEs

As a small business owner or employee you have probably heard about or even used AI to execute mundane or time consuming tasks.

But what if you could use it for more complex tasks? What if you could have an AI generate that small applications that you have always needed but don’t have the technical background or time to fully develop?

If that sounds interesting to you then keep reading 😉

Introduction

In this blog post we will focus on how custom software can enhance an SME performance and how generative AI can help in that regard.

Software development in SMEs

Custom made softwares have always given their users a competitive edge through their tailored made nature and capacity to support company specific workflows (Haider, Samdani, Ali, & Kamran, 2016).

Being able to have a specific interface to handle that specific process one of your big clients requires you to follow sounds amazing right?

Unfortunately SMEs face several challenges when dealing when custom software development : 

• Lack of internal trained professional (Ilincuta et al. 2003)
• Cost and difficulty of outsourcing software development (Moody et al. 1999, Olsen 2011)
• Difficulty in translating employees needs into software requirements and specifications (Claudia et al. 2013)
• Change resistance from leadership or employees
• Lack of development methodologies  (Ilincuta et al. 2003, Rowe 2007, Claudia et al. 2013)

In the next section we will see how AI might help you mitigating the negative impact of some of these points.

Using generative AI to facilitate software development in SMEs

There are several methodologies for the development of software however most of them will encompass in some capacity these specific steps:

• Requirements gathering and analysis
• Prototyping and mockups creations
• Specifications creation and architecture design
• Actual development

In the next paragraphs we will show how the challenges stated above relate to these specific steps and how generative AI can help you work around these issues.

Lack of trained professionals – Requirement gatherings and specifications

This issue might come in two different flavors, a lack of IT professionals (developers, business analyst, web designer) in the company or existing IT staff which are from different fields (e.g. system administration, IT support, etc…..) and therefore are not proficient enough in software development, and related fields, to build full working applications.  The former will be addressed in the outsourcing paragraph as this section will focus on insufficiently trained IT staff.

Your IT staff will engage on every steps of the development process and AI can help them workaround their limitations, the use of code generating AI and assistant like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT can help them create prototypes more easily and give them insight on how to tackle specific tasks they are not accustomed with. (Kojah et al. 2024, Turunen et al. 2023)

AI chat bots might also help you by doing part of the job a business analyst would do by enabling your employees to translate their needs into specific requirements more accessible to IT professionals. (Dwitama et al. 2020, Rajender et al. 2019)

And finally the image generation part of some generative AI tools will help you create mockups and make your vision more clear to other parties. (Lee et al. 2023)

Cost and difficulty of outsourcing software development

Outsourcing software development can come with many issues for an SME (communication problems, vendor competencies, high costs, lack of oversight, etc…..) (van de Kam 2024)

As stated above using AI powered solutions to generate requirements and mockups could better the communication with a third party software development company through the use of a common language that could facilitate exchange between the involved parties-

Vendor competencies and lack of oversight could be mitigated by using LLMs to review code and design unit tests in order to better the quality of the product hence making it easier to maintain and lessen onboarding cost of adding new developers in the project. 

In outsourcing costs are often related, even more so with hourly billed projects, to the amount of work necessary to complete the project. Using code generation AI to develop independent parts of the software (e.g. simple APIs and web services) could help keep the outsourcing cost low by allowing the third party firm to only focus on the main parts of the application and the business logic. 

Lack of development methodologies

The use of specific development methodologies can help reduce the cost of development, as much as 30% in a study conducted by (Haider et al. 2016).

Unfortunately agile methodologies such as Scrum, require multiple distinct pool of competencies like product ownership, business requirements translation, etc….. in order to add value to a project.

AI chatbot could be used in that case to emulate specific parts of these methodologies like user story creation for Scrum, Scrum poker by evaluating the possible difficulty of a task or even act as an agile coach or scrum master (Bera et al. 2023)

Conclusion

In this blog post we listed some of the main challenges SMEs face when trying to do custom software development and how AI can help adresse some of these issues.

References

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