7 STEPS A START-UP SHOULD TAKE BEFORE DEVELOPING A CUSTOM SOFTWARE

The time it takes for a software product from its initial designing phase to the final release is called Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Software development is a complex process with a lot of phases and steps. This article will talk about the steps responsible for the development, how everything works, and the results that are obtained in the process of custom software development.

How does one build a successful software product? For starters, it is very important to conduct a full-fledged business analysis. Here's where professional analysts come into play. They can precisely define your needs and give recommendations as to which solution can bring value to your organization and stakeholders. Business analysts use a set of proven techniques and tasks that help in developing a strategy to improve processes, create new policies, and incorporate important changes. Based on their verdicts, customers receive a detailed SRS (Software Requirement Specification) document. This document acts as a basis for a legal agreement, future collaboration and coherent SDLC. Let us now dig deep into the 7 steps required for software development.

Core steps required to develop a custom software solution.

How to develop custom software properly? Which steps to take first? To answer all your questions, here are 7 main software development steps that are present in the project life cycle that should be followed by any development team.

Step 1 - Brainstorming

The past years have brought some revolutionary software products and technology innovations which make, coming up with innovative ideas more challenging than ever before. How does one think out of the box? Due to the requirement of out-of-the-box solutions, product and project managers together with the development team have to create software solutions that are demanded by the market and mostly offers something different.

Brainstorming is an effective technique, quite prevalent in the IT industry. Brainstorming is a creative process to find out the best match of solutions and ideas that could be implemented during the software development life cycle. Every member of the brainstorming process shares their ideas during this discussion to find the best possible outcome. This allows everyone to put their thoughts on the table and can assess which ideas could be useful and which will not.

Brainstorming can also be associated with planning as this process generates the foremost requirements for the projects as well as creates a comprehensive roadmap for the development process. The project plan for any custom software development project is a very important process as it influences the entire development process and changes the course of actions that need to be taken in the development process.

Step 2 - Feasibility Test

Before putting your hard-earned money into the project, businesses must task themselves to carry on a feasibility test or analysis for the project and the product. The feasibility assess is a detailed study to aid your software solution making it profitable in the long run. It evaluates all the factors that can influence your product directly or indirectly. These factors could be economic or technical. For this test of function properly and help you get the desired outcome, every member of the team be it, testers, developers, PMs and others, must provide a clear estimate of the time they would take to complete a specific task, efforts that would be required, and the resources who would be involved.

Step 3 - Design

The conceptualization of the software solution is done here in the Design stage of the software development life cycle. The design of the product is developed concerning the specifications that were put down during the first two stages of software development. Like architects, designers build the whole structure of the project and present the final prototype that would be eventually be used in the following steps of the software development process.

Step 4 - Coding

This is the most time-consuming process as it has the maximum number of people working at the same time. This is the coding stage. In the coding stage, the codes are written that give life to the software product. This is the stage where developers come into play. Every developer involved in the project has a task list assigned to him/her and is completely responsible for it. The software development process is controlled and handled by project managers.

Step 5 - Integration

This stage of integration is when all sources and environment are integrated. It is done to figure out a way to create a software program efficiently. This step helps the development team to find out bugs, issues and conflicts in the software solution. Most of the development teams, especially those who follow agile methodology use continuous integration. These teams perform unit tests, use automation and test for thorough results.

Step 6 - Quality Assurance

QA (Quality Assurance) as the name suggests has to do with the quality of the software solution developed. The QA engineers that the quality of the code written by the developers. A different set of framework and techniques are used to identify bugs and errors that may occur after the solution is developed. These testers write these test cases and report the bugs and the developer in return fixes these bugs. Testers also help the developers in figuring out how to build a software product efficiently and bug-free.

Step 7 - Release

The release is when the software is ready and could be used in full capacity. Usually, the first software release is followed by the release of the next version of the product, with better and features and bug fixes. This step is considered to be the final stage of the software development process after which the custom software development company offers maintenance and support.

Every stage of the software development live cycle depends on the model of software development chosen by the software development company. Lety look at the methodologies that are often used in development.

5 Methodologies of software development

SDLC in simple terms is an industry-standard procedure to manage steps of software development. Various SDLD methodologies are used to guide developers through their project-based tasks. Since the development cycle is flexible, in recent times several different methods and models have become popular.

When considering software development do consider the following methodologies.

• Agile
• Waterfall
• Iterative
• Spiral
• DevOps
• V-shape

Agile

The agile practice has been around in the IT sector for decades now. The agile methodology states that every project needs to be managed differently and the prevalent methods need to be customized to best suit the project. Instead of managing requirements, testing and design as a large and continues step, an agile model offers them all as an ongoing process that demands the involvement of management, developers and customers.

Waterfall

Amongst all the software development methodologies Waterfall model is the oldest and in my opinion the most straightforward methodologies. Many times it is referred to as a liner-sequential life cycle model. Waterfall demands a firm structure that requires all system requirements to be pre-defined at the start of the project. The waterfall methodology is easy to understand and simple when it comes to managing.

Iterative

In the Iterative methodology, the process will start with a mere implementation of a subset of the software development requirements and iteratively improves the evolving version till the full system is integrated. Rather than beginning with sufficient knowledge of the requirement, developers implement a set of software requirements, then conduct tests, evaluates and points out further requirements is any. In this process at every iteration, the design is modified and often new functional capabilities are added.

Spiral

The spiral methodology is the most flexible amongst all the SDLC methodologies. The spiral model takes inspiration from the Iterative model and repeats it. The project while using this methodology passes through four phases over and over again in a spiral until it is completed. This allows multiple rounds of refinements.

DevOps

As the name suggests DevOps brings the development teams together intending to help the operational team to streamline the delivery and support. DevOps is the newest amongst the SDLC. When using this model the businesses can expect product updates in smaller proportions but frequent in frequency. DevOps has process trademark such as continuous feedback, discipline and process improvement and the automation of manual development processes.

V-shape

As the name suggests V-model is an SDLC methodology where the execution of the project and process takes places in a V-shape. V-model is also known as the Verification and Validation model. The V-shape originated from the Waterfall methodology. It is often characterized by a similar testing condition for each development stage as Waterfalls. Being an expansion of the Waterfall model, it is based on the union of the testing stage for each identical development stage.

Conclusion

Depending on the project requires the development teams to offer the best match of methodologies so you can get the best software solution available for the project.

If you have any question regarding SDLC processes or dos or don'ts, do leave a comment below.