Business process management is one of the most important aspects of any business. Be it sales, services or software development – every successful company has to establish a system that will help managers keep track of the workflow and complete all the designated tasks on time. Carrying out proper management is a key aspect of business reputation and, consequently, its success.

In the field of software development, business processes have their own specialties. These can be subdivided onto two smaller groups: lifecycle processes and cross lifecycle processes. The first group usually consists of such processes that are part of software development company lifecycle. They include discovering requirements, finding possible solutions, building and designing solutions, releasing and deploying these solutions, and carrying out support services for the implemented solutions (including updates, enhancements and other relevant changes). The second group of processes usually includes: planning, calculating estimations (of effort, cost, time and quality), reporting and tracking processes, standardization, personnel training, monitoring staff performance, and controlling all the software versions in terms of configuration. While the first group is aimed to take care of the job itself, all the way from designing to servicing the software, the second group of processes is taking care of technical questions that are supposed to increase productivity, quality and performance of developers and products.

All the above mentioned processes have certain characteristics that have to be taken into account. Among the most important process properties are: the cycle time (process duration), effort (how many developers are needed to complete the task), size of task (amount of lines of code) and others. It is much easier to establish a good workflow tracking system using these characteristics.

However, in order to make the above mentioned system working, it is necessary to consider a lot more factors that are often changing the amount of pressure that has to be applied to the developer team. Among these factors are capability (as a measure of efficiency in a certain project) and schedule pressure (amount of time given to process or complete a certain task).

All things considered, it is important to note that software development is one of the fields that began using workflow management to improve the quality their work as well as to effectively manage processes and coordinate developers. It proved its effectiveness and is now widely used in almost every business sphere. Using such system to your advantage will certainly develop a better cooperation within the company and, as a result, increase the quality of output from your business.