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Understanding the Software Development Process:
The importance of software in our lives must be considered. Software is essential to make various activities possible, including online shopping, video chatting with distant relatives, or simple activities like making phone calls or playing games.
Software development is a logical process that aims to produce software to meet specific business or personal objectives, goals, or processes.
A software developer writes computer code to accomplish the goal. However, it requires several steps: research, creating a data and process flow, generating technical documentation, program coding, thorough testing, debugging, and pushing it to live.
Steps of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC):
The process of software development consists of the usage of different models depending on the development team and the project to be completed. Each step of the development life cycle produces the final product needed by the subsequent step.
The requirements gathered are used to create the product’s design. The writing of the codes is then determined by design. This step is the development phase, where testing verifies and determines if the end product from the developing stage meets the requirements.
This post will further explain the basic steps that clearly define the process of software development. Keep on reading this complete guide for software engineers.
The SDLC offers a series of steps to effectively design and create a software product. The steps in the SDLC framework are as follows:
Communication:
In the first step, the user contacts the service provider. For this, he requests a desired software product, submits his request to the service-providing organization, and tries to negotiate the terms.
Requirement Gathering:
The software development team continues to work on the project from this stage onward. The team contacts stakeholders from the problem domain to get information about their requirements. User, system, and functional requirements are contemplated and segregated from the requirements. The requirements are gathered via several techniques, some of which are as described:
Conducting user and developer interviews, researching the current or outdated systems,
Referring to the database or compiling questionnaire responses.
Feasibility Study:
The team comes up with rough planning for the software process at this stage. They analyze if the software can meet all the requirements of the user or if there is any possibility that the software is no longer useful. It is determined whether the project is possible for the organization to undertake financially, practically, and technologically. Many algorithms are available to help software engineers determine if a project is feasible.
System Analysis:
System analysis includes understanding the limitations of software products, learning about system-related problems beforehand or adjustments that must be made to current systems, identifying and resolving the impact of projects on the organization and its employees, etc. The project team analyzes the scope before making schedule and resource plans. At this step, the developers come up with the best software models and best programming languages, like Java and C++, suitable for the project.
Product Design:
In the software development design stage, the SRS papers’ customer requirements are transformed into a form that can be implemented using a programming language. The three layers of design phases that make up the software design process are as follows:
- Interface Design:
Interface design describes how a system interacts with its environment. In this step, the internal of the system is completely ignored, and the system is considered a black box. The interface design should include the following details:
- A detailed description of environmental events or signals from agents that the system must respond to.
- A precise description of the actions or communications the system needs to send.
- Information on the data’s characteristics and the forms it enters and leaves the system.
It is important to ensure that the product or the webpage design is user-friendly.
- Architectural Design:
Architectural design defines a system’s key elements and their roles, attributes, interfaces, connections, and interactions. The overall system is focused on architectural design, but the internal components are ignored.
- Issues in architectural design include:
- Massive breakdown of the systems into their constituent parts.
- Allocation of components’ functional tasks.
- Component Interfaces
- Interaction and communication between the components.
- Detailed Design:
Important details missed during the interface design are included in the architectural design. The internals of the primary components are designed at the end of the design process. Extensive Planning: Design defines all internal parts, attributes, connections, processes, and frequently algorithms and data structures of all significant system components. The detailed design may involve the following:
- User interfaces
- Unit states and state changes
- Data and control interaction between units
- Data packaging and implementation, including issues of scope and visibility of program elements
- Algorithms and data structures
- Coding:
The development team comes to the stage of coding and implementation after the product design phase. The software developers can begin coding after the development team has the required specifications and the design papers.
The developers also run unit or module tests at this stage to find any issues as early as feasible. Some businesses prefer to hire a third-party software application development company to handle the coding tasks and frequently even the earlier stage of Product Design. The reasons for outsourcing range from simply needing more resources or expertise on hand to wishing to concentrate on the company’s core services and products with their team.
- Testing:
According to a calculation, testing should account for 50% of the entire software development process. Errors may seriously damage software and even cause its removal. Developers do software testing while they work on the code, and testing professionals do extensive testing at several code levels. The secret to producing dependable software is early fault detection and correction.
- Deployment of the Product:
The software product can be deployed when it has completed the testing stage. The initial batch of the product is released and made available to the public after it is finished, this process is called Beta Testing. During this stage of software application development, improvements necessary due to user feedback or issues not discovered during the testing phase can be fixed and implemented.
- Maintenance and Operations:
After completing all of the above procedures successfully and being completely published onto the market, the software product has to be maintained and kept operating. This includes troubleshooting problems and maintaining the systems with the most recent operating system patches or upgrades of used third-party applications.
