An Engineer's Guide: Five Tools For Hassle-Free Business Software Development

Business software development is always challenging, especially for engineers, who are more into technology than accounting, email marketing, finance, etc. To navigate through this corporate world, you'll need some handy tools to help you complete basic tasks. Also, these tools need to be tech-oriented and built by engineers for engineers, or else you will struggle to get through the stuff created by marketers. 

Here is a list of five great tools that are super useful when you are about to put your hands on building new business software.

Documentation: DeveloperHub.io 

If you are working on a tech product, it should be appropriately documented. Otherwise, users and partners alike will encounter problems while trying to work with it. 

DeveloperHub.io is a helpful tool for crafting comprehensive documentation with a powerful editing tool. The system has a built-in teamwork functionality, as well as a library of API references which are useful for software integrations.

Business automation: 1C:Enterprise platform

For any techie, dealing with accounting or customer management issues is something you'd like to make more customized and flexible. The 1C:Enterprise platform allows the creation of your own industry-specific software for completing accounting or other business automation activities. Using a simple built-in programming language, you can build cloud apps for multiple tasks, including accounting, finance, manufacturing, inventory, sales, orders, HR and lots more. And getting started is simplified by accessing dedicated online courses.

Analytics: Metabase 

This tool is useful for analytics. You can connect your data sources to create dashboards with multiple graphics answering your business-critical questions. It is possible to set up daily, weekly, or monthly monitoring and alerts covering significant changes happening with your product.

Resource management: Cloudyn 

The team behind the Cloud Timing project has built a tool to fight cloud waste while working with AWS. The only effective way to solve the problem is to switch off unused servers. It might be hard to do this manually, as even smaller companies nowadays may operate dozens of virtual machines used, say, for development, testing, or other tasks. 

This tool allows an engineer or even a non-technical employee in the company to configure the scheduling of cloud servers all at once. The system automatically shuts them down when necessary — thereby saving up to 60% of a business’ cloud computing costs. 

Transactional Email: Mailgun

Email is another area a typical engineer is rarely involved in. While there are dozens of email providers nowadays, not many of them are technical enough. Mailgun is a perfect tool for organizing your transactional email flow so that you can always keep your users updated on everything they need. Mailgun is excellent for engineers, as it is super technical, you can even code with it! Also, the tool has excellent functionality that helps in tracking deliverability and open rates.

Have you got any other recommendations of useful tools for building business software? Share in the comments below!