Every excellent piece of software starts with a plan and a defined development process. Otherwise, a failure is impossible to prevent. We have identified seven critical phases of software development and want to share them with you. These are consistent across different project management approaches. However, the length of each stage and the number of iterations required may vary based on your objectives, goals, team size, and other variables. Let us now take a closer look at them.

Step 1 – Planning and Ideation

The software development process begins with thorough planning and creative conception. This is the approach that every top full-cycle software development company follows. Stakeholders and development teams collaborate to determine the project’s scope, objectives, and target audience. The planning step involves determining company needs, establishing project requirements, calculating required efforts, and evaluating the possible benefit-cost ratio. The major result of this stage is a thorough project plan outlining the software product’s vision and strategy.

Step 2 — Collecting and Refining Requirements

During this phase, the attention changes to developing a thorough software requirements specification (SRS). Business analysts work with stakeholders to gather functional needs for future solutions. The final outcome from this phase is a thorough requirements document that acts as a roadmap for the succeeding software development phases and guarantees that the product satisfies the established expectations.

Step 3 — Design Development

Once the list of requirements is ready, the design step begins. During this process, software architects and UI/UX designers develop the product’s architecture and user experience. As the design process progresses, the team may modify the requirements and fine-tune the technological solution. This process produces design papers, wireframes, and prototypes that provide the structural and visual groundwork for the eventual product.

Step 4 — Engineering

With the product architecture in hand, a development team begins the engineering process. Software engineers develop code, build stand-alone functionality, and integrate several software components. Frequent code reviews and collaborative testing help to assure code quality. At the end of the engineering step, you get a functioning application.

Step 5 — Testing

Quality assurance is an important part of the software development process. The purpose of the testing phase is to evaluate the product and find and correct flaws. The testing goals and anticipated outcomes are covered in QA documentation, which varies in amount of depth. To produce defect-free software, test engineers work with prepared documentation and run a variety of tests, including functional and non-functional tests.

Step 6 — Integration and Deployment

Once the software has undergone thorough testing, it is ready for integration and deployment. During the integration process, several software modules and components are combined to create a coherent result. Deployment, in turn, entails releasing the product to customers. To guarantee a successful deployment, development and operations teams must work together.

Step 7 — Support and Maintenance

The software development process does not stop with deployment. Continuous support and maintenance are required to resolve problems, deploy upgrades, and improve the product’s functioning. Regular monitoring and input from users assist in identifying areas for improvement, allowing the development team to give continuing support for an exceptional user experience.

Popular Project Management Approaches

There are two common frameworks for managing software development projects: waterfall and agile. Your software development method will change based on the one you choose.

Waterfall

Waterfall, also known as a linear sequential model, proceeds in a linear fashion, with each phase being completed before moving on to the next. Software development in Waterfall projects generally consists of requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Each of these stages is included in one iteration of the software development life cycle.

Waterfall is an excellent match for projects with defined, unchanging goals and the ability to create a thorough plan from the start, which aligns with Waterfall’s organized software development approach. It shines in projects when the complete scope can be defined before development starts.

Agile

The Agile framework is a dynamic and adaptable set of management approaches. The core principle underlying Agile is to provide tiny, functional increments of a product. It emphasizes consumer participation, ongoing input, and adaptation to change. The Agile family includes methods like SCRUM, Kanban, and others.

Scrum

Compared to Waterfall, scrum has a disordered approach to organizing the phases of the software development process. It appreciates and recognizes versatility and a cyclic approach, with development happening in smaller segments known as the sprint. This enables the development teams to answer changes in requirements, market forces, and user feedback. Another advantage of Scrum is the existing clear role division, where there is a product owner, a scrum master, and the development team, to conduct successful project management.

The Scrum software development process typically encompasses the following stages, which mostly overlap with those of Waterfall:

• Planning and ideation focused on developing the project’s vision and objectives, defining the product backlog, and prioritizing features.
• Iteration planning involves picking things from the product backlog for the following sprint and generating a sprint backlog containing tasks.
• Execution occurs when a development team generates and delivers potentially shippable product increments by fulfilling tasks from the sprint backlog.
• Review and demo, during which the team presents the finished features to stakeholders, collect comments, and confirms alignment with the defined expectations.
• Retrospectives are meant for teams to reflect on the sprint, find improvements, and alter methods for the next iteration.
• Adaptation focused on altering the product backlog in response to feedback and changes, which influenced the planning for the next iteration.

Kanban

Kanban is a visual project management methodology that prioritizes continuous delivery and process efficiency. It uses Kanban boards to visualize the software development process and depict work items and their progress, allowing teams to handle tasks in a more flexible way. The fundamental features of Kanban span:

• Kanban visualizes the workload and workflow in columns reflecting distinct phases of development. Each work item is shown as a card, giving teams a real-time picture of the project’s status.
• Kanban aims to keep workflows balanced by limiting the number of items permitted in each column. This avoids overwhelming the team and ensures that work is finished before additional assignments are assigned.
• Kanban is a pull-based methodology, which means that new work is only added to the pipeline when the team’s capacity permits. 
• Kanban supports the continuous delivery of work items as they are done, rather than waiting for fixed time constraints.
• Kanban emphasizes continual development. Regular meetings and reviews are performed to examine workflow, identify bottlenecks, and implement changes.

Final Say!

The software development life cycle broadly has seven main phases and if followed effectively helps in the production of high-quality software. The decision of choosing Waterfall which is a highly structured approach compared to highly flexible Agile, including all its subcategories highly influences the direction of the project. If you encounter any difficulties with one or another concept, just use one of these frameworks as a guide and think over all the advantages and disadvantages of each to choose the one you need.

To read more content like this, explore The Brand Hopper

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