The only thing more reliable than death, taxes and – perhaps – the Energizer Bunny, is the relentless churn of new feature requests for software products.

The moment you complete the (ridiculously ambitious) feature-set you are working on today, your executive, marketing and sales teams will be dropping a new set of requests in your lap tomorrow.

Another tight schedule. Another Herculean effort. Another amazing delivery.

Then, again (it keeps going, and going, and going), a new set of features.

The problem at most organizations is that the features you add today actually make it harder to add new features in the future.

For a project manager, or VP of Engineering, you can quickly get caught in an ugly cycle:

1. For the new features, you need to increase the size of your team
2. As your team grows, your budget pressure grows
3. With new budget pressure, you have to cut corners on testing and other important infrastructure
4. If you succeed, the cycle starts over (with an even larger team)

Occasionally, I will talk with someone who suggests that a growing team means growing responsibility and more importance within the organization.

But the problem is that this inefficient cycle reveals itself as the solution ages. A few cycles down the road and we see:

1. It gets more expensive to add new features
2. New feature calendars get longer and longer
3. The budget begins to spin out of control
4. New features introduce serious defects in seemingly unrelated code

Once a product reaches this stage, the “hero” of the growing team is now answering some difficult questions. The CEO begins seriously considering “moving the product offshore” as if that is some magic elixir – the new team in some foreign country has no domain experience or familiarity with the code, but adding three times as many people will save the day.

Regardless, the fun work environment of addressing customer needs has shifted into a stressful environment of financial pressures and slipping schedules.

At Stelligent, we believe that the way you prevent this inefficient cycle is to invest in your “software assembly line”…find out what is really working and where you could improve. Start setting some targets for code growth, source complexity, code duplication and test coverage. Apply the business practices of “Measure, manage, execute” to your development efforts.

If you’re not sure how to get started, there are many articles here at testearly.com and on our company website that can help point you in the right direction. And, of course, you are always welcome to contact us directly.