Tech-intensive lifestyle induces software to be an integral part of the everyday routine in the 21st century. Today, it is hardly possible to imagine any activity not powered by some kind of computer-related processes.
When digging deeper, software product development is a highly organized process with precise procedures and strictly defined steps known as the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Whenever you need a sophisticated system, software suite, or end-user web or mobile app your outstanding project delivery, besides all the other important factors, largely depends on a set of processes practiced by the development team.
The Software Development Life Cycle as a collection of rules and practices helps to connect tech, non-tech team members, and project stakeholders to transform your exceptional idea into a unique software product or solution.
Here we will take a look at the most commonly adopted phases of software development to see the ways how the perfect product is launched.
- Brainstorming and planning
It all starts with a great idea. But any idea needs to be carefully thought over in order to be implemented. Meticulous planning is the initial and one of the core phases of software development or product development as it presupposes determining the scope of the project, defining means and ways for the new system to meet business strategic objectives, resource availability, cost-related issues, timeframes, and determining solutions.
- Requirements and feasibility analysis
During this phase of software development, the project is defined in detail and the analysis of the project’s feasibility is carried out. In order to build an actionable solution, clean code and catchy design are not enough, you first need for the development team to get a deeper understanding of the project goal and collect all the requirements. Feasibility analysis displays all the technical and economical aspects impacting the application development process: time, resources and tasks and involvement estimates from the team members help calculate ROI and determine project cost and profit. Requirements analysis also helps identify the risks at the very start so that risk mitigation strategies can be worked out from the very beginning.
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- Design
Software design is a preeminent component of software project development. During the design phase, the actual conceptualizing of the solution is created, that is the detailed software architecture meeting specific project requirements is created.
This is a kind of modeling visually everything starting from the functionality of the solution and up to defining the fundamental hardware/software components, software tools for the future development, structure capabilities, processes to realize its business needs and objectives of the proposed solution. After the design is identified it’s time to move to the very development.
- Development & coding
The development phase is about writing code and converting design documentation into the actual software within the software development process. This stage of SDLC is generally the longest as it’s the backbone of the whole process and there are a number of vital things to pay attention to. The software engineering team has to make sure their code meets the software requirements specifications, conforms to the stakeholders’ requirements, etc. but if the previous stages of software development were carefully fulfilled, the ready-to-use software is bound to match the requirements to the software project.
- Integration and testing
Now that the software is built and completed the next phase involving system testing and integration starts. Depending on the adopted testing processes it might vary. But typically the QA engineers use a whole range of frameworks alongside continuous integration executing unit tests, automation compilation, and testing.
- Implementation and deployment
This is a stage when the actual installation of the crafted solution takes place. It’s done step-by-step according to the implementation plan. The newly built and tested application is moved to production including data and components transfer while during the next releases only the specific changes will be deployed. Depending on the complexity of the project it might be a straightforward release (if the project is simple) or staggered released (in stages) in case of a more complex project. Now system analysts and the end-users can actually see and try out the ready application.
- Operations and maintenance
The final stage of the software development lifecycle includes maintenance and regular updates. The phase is treated with the utmost attention since during the stage the product is polished, upgraded, enhanced and fine-tuned according to the real-world feedback on its performance. That’s exactly a perfect timing to robust the application’s functionalities to upgrade its performance and modify according to the actual needs of the end-user add new capabilities or meet additional user requirements.
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