How Does Software Development Workflow Work?

Before we learn about the process of software development workflow, it is important to understand what a workflow is and how is it relevant to software development. The workflow of development helps developers in creating and committing changes to shared codebase. However, a software development workflow is not there just for the sake of the process. Instead, it can bring about huge difference to your team’s efficiency and your product quality. The development workflow helps align the members in a team, keep them busy & engaged, and maintain a balance between the quality and speed of code change.

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Often software development workflows are either miscommunicated or the communication is not as effective as it should be. Most of the times, team members only know about these. This is why onboarding new developers becomes a challenge many times. Workflows remain documented on the distant conference-room’s white boards, kept in the description of processes and are often long forgotten, and keep lying in the wiki pages with nobody bothered to turn those pages and refer to their content.

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Developers in a SaaS product development company or other software solutions development agencies don’t even refer back to these (often forgotten) documents as it takes a lot of time. Since they don’t follow the development workflow, challenges appear since multiple developers continue making changes and committing them. So, what is the best way to manage the workflow and how to ensure that your team follows the workflow and continues to move it?

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Optimize your software development workflow

Let’s quickly understand the best three ways to optimize your software development workflow.

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1. Make your processes visible by going agile
2. Enforce peer reviews of code
3. Keep integrating and deploying code

Make your processes visible by going agile: Your software development workflow should not be static rather it must be continuously and regularly adapted to your team’s way of working and how your products (software) evolve. Top-notch custom software development services providers use agile methodology to ensure delivery of products with constant changes. By going agile, you allow your team the flexibility to meet goals even if there is uncertainty. Needless to say, highly complex projects tend to introduce more uncertainty.

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For optimizing your software development workflow to quickly adapt, you need to a.) focus on the quality of code; b.) ensure continuous improvement; c.) strive for ongoing and continuous improvement. Ensure your software development workflow is accessible, transparent, makes way for reduced documentation. If you have a small team, you may begin tracking your workflow development through post-its or physical whiteboards. But, if your team is large and distributed, this may not be the best option. This is when you must go for the digital option for keeping each team member on the same page. Agile backlog and similar tools can help smaller teams.

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For ensuring continuous improvement, it is important that you include retrospectives in your software development workflow. Ensure these meetings are held regularly for evaluating team’s accomplishments, challenges they faced, and discuss &find out the ways to help them improve. These meetings can help you in process review and for figuring out the bottlenecks the team is facing. Then you may work on the workflow to resolve these issues. By constant process review and digital tools, you may change your workflow development quickly to be able to meet the team and project needs.

Enforce peer reviews of code: When you focus on the quality of code, you will need to implement the process of code review as part of the workflow development. This allows your team to easily view, comment, and involve in conversation concerning the code. Whether you offer SaaS development services or custom software development services, you would surely want to ensure that the code is reviewed (and checked) by more than one developer. This way you are able to engage your team and keep the codebase stable. Peer reviews, thus, help teams in early identification of issues, sharing of knowledge, and for ensuring that the standards of coding are maintained.

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Keep integrating and deploying code: Another way through which you can streamline your software development workflow is by automating CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous delivery). When you integrate code early and regularly, technical risks are minimized, and it is possible to find issues as soon as possible. Other developers can easily see the changes, which ensure work on the latest version.

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Use the right tool for workflow optimization

By implementing agile development practices, you can identify and fix the bottlenecks in your development workflow. Reviews of code will help control changes and build a stable codebase. By making these processes your development workflow’s part, you can increase the velocity. However, it is important that you use right tools that support your efforts.

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How does the software development workflow works?

As a project manager or startup owner, you already know the SDLC steps. The software development workflow focuses on everything right from gathering requirements, communication with stakeholders, development, and testing to ongoing maintenance. The steps are pretty much the same irrespective of the development process being used.

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So, this is how the software development workflow works:

Requirement analysis & planning: The first and most crucial part of SDLC planning, analysis is all about alignment of company’s goals and mission, resource allocation & availability, project scheduling, and cost estimation. This phase helps ensure that you are starting off in the right direction. Remember, the goal of this phase should be to empower your team with enough information that they can put together for creating a high-level project scope or scope of work.

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2. Project requirements: This step includes understanding about the project’s technical requirements. The solution you develop must be able to solve the problem of your customer and address the pain points. During this phase, you try to find answer to many questions such as:

What issues does this product solve?

Who is the targeted user and why?

What kind of information or data is required?

Are other APIs or tools also needed?

How to handle the privacy/security?

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3. Design & Prototype: Once you have gathered all the requirements, the next step is to embark on the designing to see how the software will look, feel, and work like?

4. Software development: This step is all about actually building the software solution bearing in mind the scope of work and project requirements. This phase is the toughest and possible the riskiest of all other stages of the software development life cycle and workflow. However, it is important that you stick to the scope of work (SOW) as defined earlier, avoid scope-creep, and create an efficient, clean software.

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5. Testing: Testing, tracking bugs and fixing them is a part of development as well but once your product is ready to go live, it is important to test it in-depth. This may imply beta testing (releasing the software/product to a small group) or using the user experience tools for tracking user interaction with it. Even if it is a lengthy and time consuming process, make sure you test your software thoroughly to avoid shipping software that has bugs to your real customers.

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6. Deployment: Once the software is ready, the next and final step is to launch the software to your users. Push your code into production and then let the marketing team take care of the promotion and marketing of your product.

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7. Maintenance & updates: Launch of a product doesn’t mean your job is done. No! It’s a lifecycle meaning one phase ends and another phase begins from there. So, post-launch you will have to take care of the app/product whether it is performing smoothly and meeting the expectations of real customers or not? Customer needs and requirements keep evolving and this is why maintenance and updates are important post-launch.

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All these steps are integral to the development of a software solution and none of these can be omitted or underestimated. Whether you are looking for a SaaS development services provider to minimize Google cloud platform cost for your business or you are looking for a custom software development services provider to build your dream software, knowing the development workflow will help you understand the reasons behind the timeline and cost constraints the development agencies and developers face.