We live in a digital era, where everything is subject to digitization. Creating new digital products makes it possible to grow and advance your business. Investing in software solutions is an essential pillar during the digital transformation process. To succeed, you need to know about the fundamentals of software development. So, let’s start from the basics.
What is Software Development?
Software development is the specific process when you create, design, and deploy software for mobile applications web-based solutions, or legacy systems. To ensure the development process is smooth, it’s imperative to adhere to a software development approach. There are numerous methodologies to choose from. However, the most practiced are DevOps and Agile. You can read more about these approaches by following the link.
Besides methodologies, every organization follows software development stages. There are mainly 6 of them in the software development life cycle (SDLC).
Software Development Life Cycle
No matter the methodology and project’s industry and scope, it will go through 6 common phases of development. Each of these phases carries out its concrete mission. For example,
Planning
This is the first and the most crucial stage in developing a future digital product. There is a wide misunderstanding of the agile model, that project goals must be defined for the next sprints only. Even if the development of the software is done in steps, the overall project target must be clear to everyone in the project. So, the planning phase includes information gathering e.g.
What kind of software should be built?
What are the purposes of this software?
What problems should this software solve?
How to make better software than your competitors?
Analysis
During analysis, the real-world processes are transformed into digital models. The project goals must be broken into user stories, which describe the features of the software. The end result should be discussed and documented. Afterwards, the product’s features, technologies, and budget should meet the client’s business needs pre-written in the tech documentation.
Design
The design phase is used for building the architecture and structure of the software. The basic components are decided, like using databases, message queues, workflows, software frameworks, etc. The security architecture is defined. If the software should have a user interface, then also the UX design guide is elaborated. The latter describes the graphical layout, the navigation concept, and the design of the components used in the pages according to the capabilities of the endpoint devices.
Implementation
The design stage is followed by coding. Software engineers code, configure, and add the needed features or specifications. The result of this phase is working software that is almost ready to be delivered to the client. Any software development should always start with the coding of unit test cases. Unit test cases allow permanent testing of the created software for every single piece of software.
In parallel with the development of the software, the quality assurance engineers are writing test cases for further integration testing. Writing test cases is a widely underestimated task. It requires a full understanding of the overall business requirements, project specifications, and software features. Integration test cases cover end-to-end processes. In an advanced environment, the test cases are not only text descriptions but also software, which automatically will run and document the tests.
Integration and Testing
Integration puts the pieces of software, produced by single teams or developers, together to form the targeted solution. As described in the implementation phase, test engineers must participate early in the SDLC to write the test cases for integration testing. Quality assurance engineers help the final product by spotting inaccuracies and flaws in the software. Automatic testing is high-class software testing. Companies might use a testing platform to execute and monitor the testing of software. It is crucial for project management to know the results of software testing. The number of open quality tickets is an important value figure for the quote of project readiness.
Maintenance
During the software’s live time, the system has to be monitored and adapted by providing continuous maintenance. Maintenance tasks are classified into various levels of support and contractually described in service-level agreements. The maintenance of software is organized specifically to the capabilities and knowledge of the companies. If the software was created by a service partner, then it often makes sense to outsource at least the second level of support. It means that the first customer interaction is covered by service agents of the company and then they route the tickets to the service provider for a solution. It is vital to update the software, prevent system crashes, and provide timely responses to any issues occurring.
These are the basic stages of SDLC. However, the exact order and sequence of these phases will mainly depend on corporate SD processes.
Our experience
Sencury is a custom software development, mobile app, and web development company. Throughout many years of experience, we helped to innovate businesses in many industries. Our expert team always encourages clients to innovate to improve the world.
The SDLC in our company will depend mostly on your business needs. We build our development strategy on flexibility and mutual success factors. Sencury seeks to meet clients’ project lifecycle model expectations by addressing each client’s specific requirements: we inform on project progress, schedule, budget status, test summary, mitigation risk strategy, etc.
If you need top-notch competitive software on the market, turn to Sencury! We will innovate your business up to your expectations. Contact us and let’s have a talk!
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