You may feel that your software development team is just revisiting the same problems it was facing in the previous week, month, or year. This may give you the feeling that the team isn’t productive or isn’t doing their job correctly.

Here’s the part where I confess that software development teams frequently have to go back and dig up a problem that was once considered by all parties as being, “solved”.

Well that’s a shock isn’t it? The team is wasting your money aren’t they?

Possibly not, and here is why.

The first Bentley to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans race the team covered a total distance of 2077.341 kilometers. Six years later a Bentley won the race and covered 2930.663 kilometers. The last team to win the race in a Bentley covered an astonishing 5146.05 kilometers.

The years of these races were 1924, 1930, and 2003.

The engines were a four cylinder 3.0 L making 70hp, a six cylinder 6.5 L engine making 200hp, and an eight cylinder 4.0 L engine rated at 600hp.

The challenge was exactly the same, run a car for 24 hours straight and cover as much distance as possible. But the technology advanced considerably during the periods of six and seventy three years in between wins.

The point is that you need to make sure that your development team is not continually solving the same problems under the same conditions or only to achieve the same results. Every bit of work that goes into your product has to be a demonstrable improvement upon what existed before.

This is why our teams make sure that your product collects a considerable amount of performance data with every project. It’s not just the pass/fail rates of unit tests that ensure the quality of our work. It also includes profiling each request to your site or web application and understanding how the application will behave under increased load from a geographically dispersed audience.

Yes, sometimes we solve the same problems we solved six months ago, but when the conditions change and our clients business is growing, we are dedicated to going the greater distance with them.