An Overview of Software Development
It’s pretty evident that tech-intensive lifestyle in the 21st century induces us to become more dependent on software. I go for morning walk by wearing a smart gadget which is programmable to measure my speed, pulse etc. whereas my computer is fully driven by software. From smartphones to TVs to laptops, everything runs on software or even, almost every machine around us could be a by-product of software development. Software development is a highly systematic and planned process of creating, designing, deploying and supporting an operational software by following precise procedures and well-defined steps: Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a framework to design, develop and test the intended high-quality software product to meet customer expectations. Software development team practices a set of processes to develop a sophisticated system and to transform an excellent idea into a unique software product with the help of SDLC.Here, I am going to explain steps for effective software product development.
Brainstorming and planning: The phases of SDLC start with a great idea that needs to be fully understood before implementation to determine the scope of the project. Once a perfect plan is worked out by handling means and ways for resource availability, investment issues and deadlines then developers are ready to move forward.
Requirements and feasibility analysis: In this phase, development team gets a deeper and detail understanding about the project to identify the risks at the start and carried out feasibility analysis to test the proposed system in terms of its workability, users requirements, resources availability and project cost to confirm that either a project makes sense or not.
Software Design and Prototyping: Here we go to the next step that is the designing of software wherein software architects and developers focused to design the application architecture by keeping in view the whole output of requirements and analysis phase. This step led the teams to engage in rapid prototyping by comparing different solutions and also help them to remove possible flaws.
Development & coding: Once a design is identified then development team is busy in writing program code in the appropriate programming language which goes through a pilot study to verify if the code meets the defined requirements or not. This step is the backbone of the whole SDLC process and also called programming phase.
Testing & Deployment The actual process of software development starts here when software is built and another round of more in-depth testing is conducted to ensure that you’re shipping bug-free software to customers. Now, newly built and tested application is ready to release for production. System analyst and users can find and try out the ready product. Many companies move the products through more deployment environment, before releasing it to the market, to find final mistakes. I also use beta version of many applications to let the company know how their application is working.
Operations and maintenance: The development team keep monitoring the software after production to ensure it is working properly. When users start using a software, they will surely find bugs and asks for new functionalities and features so software will be maintained and upgraded regularly to adopt new changes. I will quote WhatsApp here as its parent company keep upgrading its features for users’ convenience.
Software Development Life Cycle phases allows delivery of well-tailored software solutions that meet business requirements and satisfy customers. Although, software development is a complicated and challenging process but the addition of trending technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning will revolutionize this industry in coming years.